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Cadet
Rating: 2 Stars
Studio 2000. Produced by Scott Masters. Directed by John Travis. Written by Tyler Adams. Videography by Ross Cannon. Edited by Kevin Glover. Music by Rock Hard. Starring Mark Slade, Chris Steele, Nick Savage, Brenden Keith, Jon Eric, John Ross, Ethan Marc, Derek Michaels, Marcus Caine, and Matt West.
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Cadet aims for the emotional resonance that made director John Travis's Tailspin worth seeing, but misses the mark. At a West Point-ish military academy, Senior Cadet Officer Thomas Girard (Ethan Marc) is under investigation by the Honor Board after having been "discovered in his dormitory room under suspicious circumstances" suggesting carnal knowledge of an unknown male visitor. Gay cadets gather secretly to strategize, bracing themselves for a full-fledged witch hunt fueled by a media circus. "Can you imagine newscasters in your room asking questions about whose semen was up whose ass?" frets Cadet Mark Slade.

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Slade, who is handsome in a stuffed-bunny sort of way, gets top billing and plays the character that would have been the protagonist if Tyler Adams's script really had one. This veteran of hetero porn made an inauspicious gay debut last year with a jerkoff sequence in Travis's Billy 2000. In subsequent projects, Slade has gamely plunged into same-sex sucking and fucking, but he has yet to prove that he can handle dialogue. Here he's given a histrionic burden that would defeat a more experienced actor, including a soliloquy ("I saw my father mangled in a combine....") that may be unreadable. Slade's limitations leave the last episode without an emotional payoff, and flatten what should have been a bittersweet ending.

Skilled actors like Chris Steele and John Ross are wasted in supporting roles (although their sex scene may be the best of five). The standout performer here is Ethan Marc (he was Jeff White's clandestine working-class lover in Tailspin), who doesn't appear until the last quarter. It helps that in a video where some of the "cadets" look old enough to be angling for promotion to major, Marc looks right for his role. In his sex scene with Slade and the exchange of dialogue that precedes it, Marc is the animating element. When he cries, "Pull my hair!" as Slade fucks him, it's a searingly erotic moment? one of the few to be found in Cadet.