Frankly, most gay movies suck. Badly. And yet there are plenty of discerning, thoughtful, cinematically literate gay folks—yours truly included—who will rush out to theaters to see A Touch of Pink, Denied!, The Fluffer, or whatever other filmic monstrosity our friendly niche distributors care to push at us. Why do gay people put up with lousy movies? It’s probably for the same reason that we get so excited when we see a genuinely decent gay flick like Beautiful Thing or But I’m a Cheerleader!: gay people spend their whole lives watching movies about straight people. In practically every film we ever see, from Corpse Bride to The English Patient to Friday the 13th, we’re constantly reminded, in ways large and small, of our difference, if simply through our exclusion. So when a film comes along that is made for us, that we can actually identify with—not subtextually and not through camp, but on a simple, pure, direct narrative level—it feels refreshing, even exhilarating. Quality is largely irrelevant.

So I’m perhaps predisposed to giving Paul Etheredge-Ouzts’s Hellbent the benefit of the doubt, regardless of its vices, simply because it purports to be the first all-gay slasher pic ever made. Of course, most horror films are at least kind of gay (Hitchcock, anyone?), but I’m willing to concede Hellbent its pioneer status. After all, subtext and camp can only take us so far: it’s the difference between seeking out the repressed jock at a frat party—you know he’s there, but you have to know what you’re looking for—and stumbling into a bar in the heart of the Castro. Hellbent is more gory than dirty, but it’s thoroughly, unabashedly gay. It’s also sturdy, scary, sexy, and satisfying.

Hellbent follows Eddie (Dylan Fergus) and his three roommates (Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas, and Matt Phillips) on Halloween night as they party in the heart of West Hollywood. While they go boy hunting, a masked, shirtless muscle dude—apparently the gay answer to oh-so-straight hockey jock Jason—hunts them down, one by one. This nasty, masked daddy, fresh off the bloody decapitation of an adorable boy couple midway through a one-night stand, has taken a violent interest in Eddie (Dylan Fergus) and his pals for reasons that go largely unexplained. Things remain mercifully exposition free, moving briskly from bloodbath to bloodbath. In the midst of all the carnage, Eddie finds just enough time to strike up a tête-a-tête with first-class hottie Jake (Bryan Kirkwood). Eddie doesn’t realize that he should be less preoccupied with getting the inscrutable Jake into bed and a little more concerned with making it to the morning alive.

All the while, Hellbent proves almost endearingly formulaic: it’s all sex and death, though it’s a bit of a tease when it comes to the former, and it puts out too much when it comes to the latter. This is, after all, a movie that opens with a man getting head just before he loses his. The film plays strictly by the rules that Scream’s pomo exercises deconstructed a decade ago: if a virginal character has his moment of sexual awakening, you best believe his days, or minutes, are numbered, and general debauchery and excessive consumption get punished with egregious excess. Replace the twentysomething gay guys with an adolescent co-ed camp group, and Hellbent would feel like something straight out of 1982, right down to its sequel-friendly conclusion.

But that’s kind of the point. If Hellbent were a straight film, it certainly wouldn’t be noteworthy and probably wouldn’t even be watchable. It isn’t a straight film, though, and whether or not it’s a double standard, different rules apply. The vast majority of gay movies suffer from shoddy filmmaking and bad production values. The few that are passable often collapse under their own sense of difference; from the art cinema of Gregg Araki to the modest entertainment of Trick, too often a preoccupation with gay sensibility still overwhelms good gay storytelling. Hellbent avoids those missteps. It works because it’s a well-made, by-the-numbers genre piece with beautiful boys and a completely uncomplicated and fairly chaste gay twist. While we all wait for the next Happy Together, it’s nice to be treated to some unambitious gay entertainment. More than anything else, gay audiences still need more movies like this: solid, well-made pieces of cinema that neither hide nor flaunt gay sensibility and sexuality, decent movies that just happen to be gay.

The film certainly has problems. Its Butchest-Story-Ever-Told obsession with muscled boys and metal music wears a little thin. And Etheredge-Ouzts’s biggest gesture towards making some sort of statement, in the person of a male model masquerading in drag to see if anyone might want him for his mind and not his body, goes nowhere slowly. Still, these are quibbles. Hellbent is an unspectacular success; it does everything it sets out to do; and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. That’s no small praise, coming from someone who sat through Kyle MacLachlan playing Cary Grant, just for the sake of gay entertainment. Talk about horror…