The plot of the film starts out well enough, an older man with daddy issues that are never explained gets his rocks off literally by looking at the exposed backs and butts of boys he picks up on the street and pays. He never touches them, just looks. He keeps his house meticulously and appears to be obsessive compulsive, unable to express emotion, and to have an aversion to being touched. He also stalks the father he hates. Then he picks up a street punk who whacks him in the head and steals his money. He begins to stalk the heterosexual boy and finds he lives a violent life of poverty which eventually will end up with him badly beaten. He meets with him again and tells him that there is more money which he can have if he will keep him company. That's where it falls apart. The viewer would have been okay if the boy had slowly come around in response to father like kindness in a hurt/comfort manner. The viewer would have been okay if Armando had fallen into a one sided unrequited love with a straight boy. But one moment the boy is aggressively straight the next he is all over Armando who can't respond to him because of his touch aversion. The boy blames Armando's father and kills him. They finally have sex. Then Armando follows him to the store the next morning and calls the cops on him. It is possible that the plot twist was meant to be that Armando was setting up the murder of his father all along, but even so, the whole thing comes across as unbelievable. There are major holes in the believability. Probably biggest is why the heterosexual Elder would just suddenly want him enough to kill for him. There are plenty of others though. The older man shows almost no emotion though the entire film and the dialogue is barely there one liners. He follows his father and says once and only once that he wishes he was dead. Why would Elder draw the conclusion that his father was the source of his touch issues? He isn't a psychiatrist or even overly bright. Why turn him in when no one saw him and he even collected his brass? It just falls apart. It is billed as a romance/drama but there is no romance in it at all. It seems to be headed somewhere for a while and that is why I give it 2 but then it just meanders off and dies.
