MOVIE REVIEW

Love lost in angry characters.

By Kevin Crust, Times Staff Writer

Straights are the enemy in writer-director Everett Lewis' "FAQs," an at times laughable drama about an avenging angel named Destiny determined to make the streets of West Hollywood safe for the young souls who seek it out to claim their sexual identities.

The movie opens as a revenge drama in which Destiny (Allan Louis), a strapping vision in glitter and heels, rescues a young man from Colorado named India (Joe Lia) — who has more pluck than street smarts — from a pair of suburban gay bashers (Adam Larson and Josh Paul). Destiny takes in India as part of her menagerie of street kids that also includes a butch lesbian named Lester (Minerva Vier) who wants to be an auto mechanic and keep her breasts under wraps.

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India joins Destiny in keeping the lost and lonely off the streets and the film becomes more about their mutual desire to resist succumbing to the temptation of violence that rules the straight world. The one-bedroom apartment becomes increasingly crowded as India begins to collect cute boys like so many stray cats.

The campier aspects of the film are not enough to make up for its lapses into melodrama and just plain silliness. Though Destiny's vigilante diva is a striking mix of Grace Jones and Catwoman, there are far too many scenes of angry adolescents declaiming death unto the heterosexual world and waxing poetic about the power of love.

'FAQs'

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Nudity, sexuality, threat of violence