Hell Is for He/She's

K-11
directed by Jules Stewart
Breaking Glass Pictures
In theaters and iNDEMAND 3/15/13

There comes a point, as you’re watching a film or TV show (or reading a book, I suppose) that deals in a contempo archness or the much-coveted but hard-to-achieve “black humor,” when you have to throw up your hands and say, “Well, I like this” or “I don’t like this.” I.e., the thing works or it doesn’t. I’m struck by this required gut instinct as I view Jules Stewart’s new “jail hell” exploiter K-ll, which on a few levels is a nightmare, on a few others a major load of laughs, for the right and the wrong reasons.

K-11 is a drama and it’s a comedy. It has to do with race and gender and sexuality and drugs and violence, all that good stuff. It takes place in the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail, where one Raymond Saxx Jr. (Goran Visnjic), a presumptuous Hollywood cool-guy record producer, finds himself locked up in the jail’s K-11 ward (a section reserved for trannies, homosexuals and other gender-issue individuals) after a night of druggy wildness the details of which are for him a bit fuzzy. Saxx Jr. has been cast into an inferno, a real motherfucking hell hole in which transsexual queen bee Mousey (Kate del Castillo) rules the roost with an iron fist and big pointy halter tops; Mousey holds all the aces ‘cause she controls the drug trade in the ward via an arrangement with a seriously disturbed sheriff's deputy, Lt. Johnson (D.B. Sweeney), who’s also been snorting up the profits. There is of course a motley crew of obstensibly messed-up transgender types crammed in K-11, like the delicate, shattered Butterfly (Portia Doubleday), and a scary muscleman child molester (Tommy 'Tiny' Lister). So our “hero” Ray’s got to negotiate in and around this unholy, dangerous mess and figure out how to get his sorry white ass out of here, basically.

Del Castillo as Mousey is your whirlwinding Latina spitfire of high, high drama even clipping her toenails; Sweeney is so over-the-top deranged as the horndog cop with a snowballing dope addiction that it’s…you gotta see this guy in action, his head literally looks like it’s going to pop off, Jesus Mary and Joseph…Doubleday as Butterfly is capably whispy and spaced out; Lister as that big and I mean big bad child molester is genuinely horrifying.

The “issues” for some in watching a piece of cartoon art like this are going to be mainly whether the stereotypes are somehow insulting or degrading. They are, but the question might be too whether there is a kind of illumination achieved when you read a comic book or watch an exploitation film, as if the super-amplification (exaggeration) of the characters’ superficially ugly or stupid traits can perhaps force you to ask yourself some questions about your own ugly, stupid assumptions. Know what I mean?

K-11 is a comic book, a well-thought-out, sharply drawn and fairly absorbing one. You will feel horror, anger, disgust, a deeply bummed-out despair and a few other sort of negative emotions. Possibly, though, you'll laugh.
–– John Payne