Let’s talk about the 1995 film THE HUNK BOAT. It’s about “five hot frat buddies” sharing a houseboat for a weekend where clothing is not just optional, it’s penis! Where the waves aren’t the only loose, wet shapes growing mold on a boat! Sorry, these aren’t great loglines. The front of the box screams, “SET SAIL ABOARD THE U.S.S BEEFCAKE FOR THE HUNKIEST CRUISE OF ALL TIME!” which was already a masterpiece of salesmanship.
Maximum hotdoggers may recognize THE HUNK BOAT from the last time I tried to review it and the tape didn’t work. Well, I fixed it*. Which means buns. Which means possible flopping dongs. Which means if someone comes up behind you while you’re reading this, those are the two things you’ll be talking about. The title THE HUNK BOAT is not a trick. If anything, it says too much.
* Don’t ask me how, but I could only get the cursed cassette to play through a h̴̡͍̙̏̉͐o̶̺̥͛l̴̟̩͍̈́̓ę̸͖͍͐̄ in a 1995 hunk calendar.
We open on Warren Scott, nudely practicing his “What I Did Over Summer Vacation” speech. Warren is 31 years old, so this is either a 4th grader who was held back 22 times or a strange way to frame your sex boat video.
With the oratory skills you’d expect from someone who saw this set and decided to take off his clothes and stay, Warren asks, “Can you imagine… five rowdy guys? All alone. In the middle of nowhere?” Then he pauses. Much longer than you’d think. Longer than it should take to imagine even six rowdy guys. “I’m not going to be able to tell everything that happened in this report,” he finally adds, the emphasis on all the wrong words. He wants this to suggest all these best pals were fucking, but the real subtext is, “Reading is a struggle for me; I’ve always been more of a moist hole learner.” The important takeaways are these: these idiots are really committing to the creepy school report bit and all sexual intimacy will be, at best, vaguely implied. Welcome to THE HUNK BOAT.
“No hardcore action.” It’s the final sentence on the back of THE HUNK BOAT‘s box, and it inadequately prepares viewers for its chaste, almost childlike approach to nudity. It’s like someone at a Lake Mead Tourist Board meeting jumped up to suggest, “Let’s add more taints, right? Confused, naked dummies and the backs of their balls!” before remembering they were the entire Lake Mead Tourist Board.
Before we get to that, let’s do a hunk roll call.
Warren Scott you’ve met. His four “frat buddies” are Michael Golden, Joshua Matt, Robert Allen, and Tico Cordova. That’s five men, eight first names, and zero romantic chemistry. This video looks like five dudes having a normal weekend at the lake except they said yes to a guy at the water ski rental place who offered them eight hundred bucks if they did it naked and let him film it.
I’m not sure why they’re so coy about things. Maybe it was so they could market this obviously softcore gay pornography to stupid women? But, I mean, this was 1995, not 1992. They could just make gay pornography. There was no need to create this secret beef code to sneak it into a fishing video. The entire first ten minutes is a series of excuses to get them, five regular joes, to take their dicks out. For instance:
They get the dongs started by having Warren stand on the deck of the U.S.S. Beefcake, waving wildly at a couple on a nearby boat. “Hi, guys! Hi! I’m Warren! I’m 31 and three quarters and I got a B in vocabulary! Sometimes my friends pull down my swimming trunks to show everyone my no-no tube! Uh oh! Like I was say-ing!”
And look, I’ve been on enough lake trips to know how hard it is to transition into a boat orgy. You can’t just rip the shorts off the dumbest guy and hope for the best. And sure enough, Warren’s flopping hog does nothing to get things going. The bros and dudes go back in the cabin and play a few hours of no-stakes, platonic man poker. It is objectively bad television, but then they come up with the inspired decision to have the guy with the worst hand get naked and “get out there and do some jumping jacks, bro. Right now.” Which means we are two penises into an all-male adult film and everyone is still pretending to have never heard of Gay.
Here’s what’s crazy. The couple in the boat are still there! Have they been hanging around for three hours while the hunks played poker hoping to see some more dick? If so, a naked Robert bursting into the sunlight to shake his junk at them has to be a better-case scenario than they could have hoped for. Think of the victory this must have been for one of them. “Honey, leave the anchor where it is. We’re not fighting about this anymore! There are five studs on that boat and it’s only a matter of time before another one of them gets out on that deck and shows us what he’s got. I don’t care when your mother was expecting us ba– see!? See, right there! Look at that fat dick! I fucking told you so.”
And that’s it for the first day of this erotic houseboat journey. They cut to the next morning, where Warren is sleeping alone. He has no covers and like Winnie the Pooh, he is wearing only a t-shirt and a boner. Through voiceover, he jokes about how his big, dumb erection gets in the way as he sleepily gets some juice. He says he isn’t embarrassed, though; because he learned on this trip that the other guys get them too. So holy fucking shit, these 30-year-old gym buddies are… what, learning about their bodies?
I can’t keep track of this fiction. They know they are gay men, the viewer knows they are gay men, the consumer was hoping they were gay men, and here they are pretending to be The Straight Bro Puberty Squad solving spooky clues in “The Case of the Sticky Erection.” Like, the box made it clear this wasn’t going to be a poop deck view of a Lake Mead suckfest, but I figured the stars of THE HUNK BOAT wouldn’t be learning about their penises for the first time. This is the first and last erection of the film and Warren presents it to us like a shy girl ordering a corndog. It’s pathetic. Quaker pediatricians paint sexier pictures with words than Warren Scott narrating his own throbbing cock.
Up next is the outdoor shower Robert rigged up for a fourth flimsy excuse to get naked. So far we’ve gotten nudity from a pantsing, a dare, and a man discovering boners. Now we’re watching a man act like it’s normal to clean yourself by shivering soaplessly under a rain gutter. Robert paws at himself with the exact sexuality of an eyeball in an eye washing station. Who knew it would be so hard to make the thing after they came up with the idea of THE HUNK BOAT?
Still struggling to figure out a way to get this party started, the boys go back to playing cards. This time they don’t even remember to make it hunky. They just each draw a card and the low man has to clean the place. Tico loses and gets to work in the kitchen. Not for an insane amount of time, but much, much longer than it takes for a viewer to think, “Are they really going to stand here and film this guy doing the goddamn dishes?”
But after a few minutes, Tico gets an idea on how to make it sexy:
And with Tico’s butt, they are now 25% done with the video and completely out of ideas on natural ways to get men nude. Jumping jacks, showers, housework… that’s it. What else do hardbody studs do naked? Oh, right! Snorkeling!
The bros flap around the lake like beautiful mermaids, as close to free as their manly hearts will let them soar. Warren has long since run out of things to say, so this part is set to five minutes of jazzy saxophone while their waterproof camera, which should have air quotes around both those words, does its best to center everyone’s balls. You know the difference between art and pornography when you see it, and while this video is never pornography, it is now finally art.
Okay, enough swimming. Let’s heat things up. It’s time for Mike and Josh.
Warren explains, “Mike and Josh would often go off on their own.” Then he playfully waits a deranged amount of time before adding, “We never knew exactly what they did out there.”
He pauses again, thinking he’s building some kind of tension. “Together,” he coos, so long after saying the previous sentence they don’t even seem related. I know I’m making fun of Warren’s narration a lot, but he is worse at implying gay sex than Tim Allen in a Kevin Spacey biopic. I can barely tell what he’s getting at like a joke about Tim Allen starring in a Kevin Spacey biopic.
Back on the boat, the other three studs are blowing it with frisbees. So let’s check back on the ocean of passion crashing against the cliffs of Mike and Josh.
Oh. I guess Josh dropped Mike off on some barren shore and left him there to jerk off? He gets naked to his boots and builds a little chimpanzee nest out of his clothes and rocks. His heart is not in it and it looks uncomfortable. For everyone involved. No one in the cast or crew seems to know if we’re here to watch this man pleasure himself or lay down and die in the gravel, so he gets up and lumbers off, pawing at himself as absent-mindedly as his wandering. And I get it, this is weird. I didn’t know I would have so many notes about how Mike masturbates either.
Mike never finds anyone or anything, which is lucky, because a nude hulk with a third of a boner climbing onto your property is exactly what Nevada gun laws were written for.
Far from Mike’s beefquest, Warren, Tico, and Robert are back on the boat trying to figure out organic ways to get each other’s clothes off. Warren suggests jumping off the boat again, but naked this time. “Naked alrightalright let’sdoit,” someone replies, very naturally. They nudely climb the ladder with the exact same sense of personal space and desire to be there as a human centipede.
After another long underwater penis sequence, we go back to Mike who is dressed and waiting for Josh to pick him up. Whatever he needed to do is done, and all we know is that it was something he had to do by himself, he couldn’t wear clothes for it, and it had nothing to do with masturbation. Which rules out everything other than witchcraft and coyote sex. Anyway, he climbs aboard and gets naked again so he can read some old magazines Josh found in the boat debris.
Warren had a kitty cat purr in his voice when he said these two kept running off and getting up to God knows what, and I guess that could legally include “absolutely nothing,” but from the intended audience’s perspective, this is bullshit. Half of their speedboat time was spent apart, and the rest was spent adrift, flipping through old Fisherman Quarterlies. Straight, gay, or first cousins, it is very weird none of these bored, naked men have put forward the idea of having sex. I’ve never seen anyone this not horny, and I spent the last two days telling my wife about THE HUNK BOAT.
Speaking of, back on the houseboat, the other three hunks remain nose deep in each other’s buttholes as they climb to the roof for more naked diving. They all towel off, sharing small talk about the beautiful day. Aside from the hanging balls, it’s pretty uneventful. So uneventful I was starting to think these hunks weren’t even bad boys. But then it faded out on this shot:
Oh, SHIT.
The romantic leads of THE HUNK BOAT can barely tolerate each other and no one else seems to have heard of sex, so at this point of the video it seems like everyone has given up. “Are we still doing this? I’m trying to read,” says fully-clothed Robert. “Oh, that’s good. We’re leaving that shot in,” says the editor.
It feels more like we’re embedded with nudists than making smut. At this point Warren himself says, “In a couple of days, nobody even seemed to notice we were running around naked. As much as we were dressed.” So then what are we doing here, Warren? As if to answer, Warren smiles and says, “When Josh and Mike went off on the speedboat. Doing who knows.” And then there’s a long pause here for whatever reason. “What. The rest of us would get our turn.”
Okay, so that sexy boat from earlier that gave us a madman wandering the wastelands in only his boots and another one regrowing his hymen is now in the hands of the bad boys! Ladies! It’s! Time! To! Fuck!
Wait, no, they’re tubing. To be fair, he is only wearing a life vest, so if you’re into it, know that somewhere in the bouncing blur of that VHS footage are some unsecured testicles. Meanwhile, the hottest couple on the U.S.S. Beefcake, Josh and Mike, are back to doing what they do best: going their separate ways and not fucking. There’s a moment here I want to share with you at about 33 minutes in, where the director seems to finally remember what they set out to do and they ask Josh to make it sexy. It’s a hilarious disaster:
If there was an award for revealing your pink thong in the sexiest way, Josh would not only never win, he would be arrested for sarcasm crimes. This is, without question, the worst I’ve ever seen someone take off pants, and I spent the last two days trying to pantomime THE HUNK BOAT for my wife. Josh makes taking a nap in a chair look like a goddamn Irish famine documentary. And while I’m giving notes on his butt, some of these closeup decisions should have been made after verifying all of Josh’s holes were camera-ready.
A synth piano plays “Somewhere Out There” while a camera man pervs out on Josh’s hairy buns, and I simply can’t bring myself to add joke elements to something so already absurd. The video is now maniacally jump cutting between slow pans down Josh’s flaccid penis as he does the splits to three bros getting their bottomless water ski on. We are watching reason and sexuality die together, here on the fading magnetic oxide particles of this hunk tape.
I admit I don’t have the keenest gaydar, but the Straightness of this video can’t be overstated. Aside from the hairy dick flapping somewhere in that spray, this would look like three guys out on the lake in between the times they spent never kissing a boy. Warren constantly tries to make things sexy, but no one takes him up on it. For instance, when Tico comes in from the bottomless tube ride, Warren asks, “Did you almost reach an orgasm!?” And instead of saying something cute like, “Maybe you could help me, hunk,” he goes, “Ha ha beat up my balls too, man!” They literally have no idea this was meant to be sexy. Robert only uses his penis to open beers. If you sat down and explained to Tico what intercourse was, he would ask if it’s coming out for N64.
Unfortunately, it’s time to go home. Warren says, “Like all good things… My summer vacation.” And then after some time he adds, “Finally had to come to an end.” The gang says goodbye like all bros do after they were hired to fuck on a boat for a weekend: with every single type of handshake.
I love it. It’s such genuine, secure masculinity from such a weird mix of buff virgins and gay porn actors. They’re all going home with some great shared memories and very even tans. Then we are brought back to the grim reality that all of this is taking place inside the show n’ tell presentation of Warren, a 31-year-old grade schooler.
We cut back to the shot of him on his bed where he says, “We all had so much fun. We decided to do it again.” And after some time he continues, “Get together over Christmas Break.” A pause. “I think we’re gonna go snow skiing.” An unexplained hour of silence goes by. “Up in the mountains,” he adds. Still not done, he waits a good amount of time before emphasizing, “Snow skiing. Naked.”
“What a rush!” he decides after a long deliberation. Then he rolls over onto his back and starts massaging his flaccid penis to no effect. Like a gorilla accidentally killing her pet caterpillar. The perfect ending to 1995’s Most Failed Boat Orgy, Hand Stuff & Under Division.
Bonus Content for Hunk Lovers Only: There’s an ad on the end of the VHS for the production company’s flagship series, America’s Hunkiest Home Videos. It is nothing more than amateur footage sent in from nude maniacs splashing water on themselves. Most women recognize this as their least wanted Instagram DMs, but in 1995, it was a thing you could buy! Nude dads mowing lawns, lonely guys in bathtubs… it even featured Unnamed Ginger Creep Making Love to His Garden Hose!
And splish splash, ladies! It’s fan-favorite, Unnamed Mook Swatting Bath Water Onto His Dong! Speaking of, I know we’ve all sort of reached our limit for flopping penises today, so I’ll carefully censor this one. Thanks, everyone! Hope you enjoyed the hunks!
