Hoy-hoy, Halloweeners, and welcome to another installment of the "Trick or Treating Twosome's Halloween Hottie List." Andrei "Eli Roth" Trostel tackles the ladies, and Gavin "soon to be Colton Haynes' husband" Pitts goes for the gentlemen. Past Halloweens have seen us tackle winsome witches, dreamy demons and voluptuous vampires.
This Halloween, Andrei and I raid the cutlery drawer for something long, metal, and sharp. Put on our mother's best frock and enact a strict "no showering in the motel bathroom" policy as we go behind the hockey mask and get under Freddy's fingernails with horror's top five sexiest male psychopaths.
5. Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000)
"I'm Bat… um… Bateman."
Before Christian Bale contracted the strange disease that made him speak all movie lines in a stage whisper, he toplined this excellent adaption of Brett Easton Ellis' controversial novel about a pretty yuppie who is also a deranged, misogynistic serial killer. While the book is deadly serious, and becomes so sadistic it's essentially 50 Shades of Grey, only more romantic, the film is blackly funny.
Bale's Bateman is completely empty of any empathy and emotion inside, so devotes all his time to presenting the perfect exterior. This results in a) him being super-buff and b) getting naked every opportunity he can. Whether doing crunches, tanning, all-over moisturizing, or having sex with two prostitutes at once while being more interested in his own body than the two women, Bale/Bateman spends so much time naked in this movie that his butt should have gotten its own screen credit.
At one point, Bale is totally naked and chasing after a victim with a very real and working chainsaw. This is a possible explanation for the Bat-Whisper—every time he remembers the chainsaw scene, his testicles retract into his body cavity.
4. Cameron Bancroft as Bernie in Love and Human Remains (1993)
"A Canadian serial killer? Do I kill you then apologize?!"
This French-Canadian thriller takes the horror movie trope of maniacal slasher as a walking metaphor for the evils of pre-marital sex to an arthouse-y conclusion. Rather than having Jason Voorhees turn up with sharp-edged farming/sport equipment and turn copulating twenty-somethings into McNuggets, Love and Human Remains has a serial killer standing in for the AIDS virus, as a group of bed-hopping twenty-somethings attempt to negotiate the boundaries of friendship and relationship while a maniac is running around hacking up sexually active men and women.
Add Thomas Gibson in one of his last acting jobs before he lost all hope and took the job opposite Jenna Elfman in Dharma and Greg, a psychic prostitute, and several seriously beautiful male actors, and you have a film that would reduce Jason Voorhees vision to a red mist.
The most beautiful of all the men in the cast, Cameron Bancroft is eventually revealed to be the killer—although considering that he's completely naked when he makes this climactic confession, you'd be forgiven for missing the reveal (well, the one from his mouth anyway) and thinking that it was an X-Files-style open-ending.
3. Julian Morris as Josh in Donkey Punch (2008)
"I learned all my sex moves from 50 Shades of Grey."
This criminally under-seen British horror flick deals with seven twenty-somethings—three girls and four guys—who borrow a luxury yacht from a wealthy friend's dad in order to go for a maritime weekend that will put the "sea" in "seamen." There's something for everybody in the ensuing orgy sequence—the men show just as much exploitative skin as the men. Unfortunately, one of the seven also puts the "asshole" in "donkey punch" when he takes the mythical, dangerous sexual practice (seriously, don't try this at home, unless you know Harvey Keitel's character from Pulp Fiction) as truth, and tries to do it.
One dead orgy member later, the remaining friends find out that perhaps Jason Voorhees is right to punish young folks for pre-marital sex, as a weekend of the bad kind of debauchery—murder, madness and Final Destination-style elaborate death sequences (the climactic one involving an outboard motor and a necktie is a wince-inducing highlight)—results.
As the young man who delivers the copulatory coup-de-gras that gets all the literal and figurative backstabbing started, British actor Julian Morris (Cry Wolf, Sorority Row and Once Upon a Time) is sweet, naïve, beautiful—and totally, sociopathically ruthless when it comes to making sure nobody is ever going to tell anyone what he did in the heat of passion.
It's difficult to be menacing when you're completely naked with your nethers flopping around, but Morris, er, pulls it off.
It's always the quiet ones. Also, the ones with access to the galley's cutlery drawer.
2. Jeremy Renner as Jeffrey Dahmer in Dahmer (2002)
"I may be Hawkeye, but this is still not as homoerotic as ARROW."
Jeremy Renner has been the unconventional, overlooked beefcake in The Avengers movies (as Hawkeye), for a while now. (Mind you, this is quite understandable when the other guys in the films include Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston.) However, back in 2002, Renner was not so much the unconventional, overlooked beefcake as looking for extremely unconventional, undercooked, and disturbingly literal beefcake as the ultimate bad date: cannibalistic gay serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Renner doesn't really look that much like Dahmer—the resemblance is mostly in the eyes and hair color—but he really throws himself into the part (let's hope for his co-stars he wasn't method). It's a powerhouse performance that elevates the film into creepy classic territory. Watching Renner stalk, woo, sleep with, murder, and eat his young male victims (sometimes in that order, sometimes not) becomes eerily compelling, as Renner imbues Dahmer with both a tragic loneliness and a weird charisma that makes it almost impossible to look away from him.
The fact that he's naked a lot and snogging lots of other guys is just gravy.
Let's just say that whenever the two blond Avengers Chrises—Evans and Hemsworth—have shirtless scenes in future Marvel movies, that Hawkeye may be drooling over them for a multitude of reasons.
1. Gaspard Ulliel as Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising (2007)
"Admit it, you'd still kiss me."
Between the initial Oscar-winning then increasingly Shatner-cured ham stylings of Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs through Red Dragon, and Mads Mikkelsen somehow mumbling and mispronouncing his way to critical acclaim in the otherwise excellent HBO series Hannibal, there was this largely forgotten entry in the "Hannibal MD (Maniacal Doctor)" movie series.
The film examines a much younger Lecter in WWII era Lithuania and shows us how he was shaped into a brilliant madman with a disturbingly literal taste for homicide. Beautiful French actor Gaspard Ulliel (St Laurent, Paris Je'taime) plays the twenty-something Lecter, and has me drooling over him the same way—if for slightly different reasons—he does over the evil soldiers in the film.
Ulliel manages to be charming, erudite and stunningly sensual, even when drowning a victim in a giant vat of ethanol, giving someone a Norman Bates-style crash course in taxidermy, or wearing yet another version of the bite-restraint half-mask that Hannibal series has seemingly trademarked alongside Bach arias, disturbing uses of human skin and penis tucking dances (I guess that also counts as "disturbing uses of human skin").
You know Ulliel is beautiful when you find yourself envious of a guy who Ulliel is biting the face off of.