K-11: The 1920s Pansy Craze in a 2012 Prison

K-11 (2012) is a cell block for gay and transgender inmates at Los Angeles County Jail.  There is, in fact, such a cell block, but it's nothing like this movie.

Record producer Raymond Saxx (Goran Visnijic) awakens from a drug blackout to find himself in a room full of transwomen with big breasts who sleep with butch gay men, and effeminate gay men, all black, who don't sleep with anyone.  At first he thinks he's in an insane asylum, but soon he realizes that he's in K-11.

He doesn't belong there; he's "not crazy" (that is, not gay).






This is a jail, not a prison, so the inmates are there temporarily, while awaiting bail or their trial, but they act like they're in for life.

They spend their time doing each other's hair, having fashion shows, having sex with each other and with guards, doing drugs -- cocaine is plentiful -- and living in fear of cell block leader Mousey (Kate de Castillo playing a transwoman).




Plus Detroit (Tiny Lister Jr.), a lumbering, dimwitted black child molester who keeps raping inmates (even though there are no children in the cell block).  He has set his sights on the petite Butterfly (Portia Doubleday playing a transwoman).  Mousey disapproves, but does nothing to stop him.

Meanwhile guard Lt. Johnson (D. B. Sweeney) controls the cocaine trade in exchange for sex with the inmates, using the go-between Ben (Jason Mewes, who you may know as the homophobic Jay from the Clerks movies).




We never find out what Saxx, a straight guy, is doing in K-11, but in the best "helpful straight" mode, he begins helping them with their problems.  When Butterfly kills Detroit, he comes up with a way to exonerate her and get revenge on Lt. Johnson.

Meanwhile he has his own problems: he's being charged with the murder of songwriter Ian Sheffield (Craig Owens), who was having an affair with his wife.  She agrees to say that it was an accident if h hands over his entire fortune except for his car, his chauffeur, and $30,000.  He agrees, gives $13,000 of it to Mousey, and rides off with his chauffeur in his bathrobe, a free man.

Huh?





This movie is sordid and unpleasant to watch, with idiotic characters and dialogue, transwomen played by cisgender women, butch-femme gay couples, gay men who are intensely attracted to people with long hair, makeup, and big breasts.

Has anyone in the cast and crew ever met an actual gay person before, or are they depending on movies from the 1970s...um, I mean from the 1950s....actually, from the "pansy craze" of the 1920s?

Ok, what clueless troglodyte wrote this mess?  Jules Stewart, a script supervisor with only two writing credits, the other being about a brother and sister who are accidentally trapped in the Van Gogh painting One Starry Night (okay.....).  Her daughter, Kristen Stewart, was originally going to play Mousey, but dropped out.  I wonder why.

And Jared Kurt, a location manager.  This is his only writing credit, but he played Lt. Killjoy in The Republic (2010).

The top photo, by the way, is Ian Nelson, who has a minor role as a guard.