Scans_Daily

Gay panic is "I'm afraid I'm gay." This was "I'm afraid I'm going to be raped." (Unless, deep down, he knew he would have liked it , which would have explained the delay, but would have added another layer of trainwreck to this. Maybe another three or four layers.) It's still pretty stupid, since any panicking should accelerate the transformation, It's as though a writer wanted Superman to lose his powers, so he wrote in that being under a yellow sun makes him weak on Thursdays.

As for "Luellen," it is a real last name, a variant of "Llewelyn," so he could have been legitimately called that. And I'm sure he picked that name at random, and it had nothing to do with making the character come across as effeminate. No, absolutely nothing at all. Nope. Not a bit.

Worse than that, I thought, was the "oh, pith." Before that, Dewey could be more predatory than gay. (As could Luellen, except that he's, um, Luellen) After that, I have to reread all of his dialogue as though it were spoken by Charles Nelson Reilly with an exaggerated lisp.

The thing is, the scene would have worked better if those two things had been left out and Dewey and Luellen had just been predatory. The thing that makes rape scenes scary is the rapist asserting absolute power over a helpless victim. (Which is also what makes them satisfying when the victim turns out to not be so helpless.) Throwing in a few campy gay stereotypes just distracts from that.

But there'd still be the whole "Banner doesn't turn into the Hulk when he's afraid, even though he always turned into the Hulk when he was afraid before" thing. And I could have done without "I'll get big and green and tear your...head off." Basically, it would have been salvaging this incredibly horrific disaster and coming up with a slightly less horrific disaster. Even reading this as a parody of a Village People song that I've heard far too many times in my life doesn't help.

And this was supposed to be their adult version of The Hulk. It seems that in 1980, "adult" and "gratuitous attempted rape scenes" were synonymous. Good thing we've moved past that.

Um, never mind.