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Intimate Police Work: A detective (Noel Palomaria, left) gets up close and personal with a serial killer (Malcolm Moorman). Tricky Business Gore effects obscure gay drama By Richard von Busack ED WOOD DIDN'T DIE in vain after all. The almost primordially bad Hard is three inept movies wrapped into one. In the first, Raymond, née Ramon (Noel Palomaria), a gay police detective, hides his sexuality from the rest of the officers. In the second, a secretly bisexual family man inexplicably moves his male trick into the house where he lives with his wife and kid (?!?). In the third part of Hard, this self-same trick, Jack (the highly unsinister Malcolm Moorman), reveals himself as the serial-killing maniac who has been scattering the bodies of dead teenage hustlers all over the L.A. basin. To taunt the police, Jack picks up Ramon, sleeps with him, steals his badge and makes a number of harassing crank calls to the officer. You'll love the scene in which the LAPD lets Jack go, even after pulling him over with no license plates and a clearly visible bloody victim in the passenger seat. What was director John Huckert thinking? I suspect I know the answer to this question. Huckert had an original idea about the problems of a gay police detective, but some crowd-pleasing instinct or some industry expert told him to beef it up with the exhausted old serial-killer plot. Then he hired some really good makeup artists to repel the hell out of anyone who isn't a congenital gorehound. These kids who did the severed dicks, hamburgerized faces and bloody heads really worked "hard" for the money! If you can stomach the stage blood, Hard is almost worth watching for its unintentional humor. Sample lines: "No woman has been capable of giving me a damn blow job like a damn queer"; "I've spent more time in the locker room rinsing out my jock strap than you have had being a cop"; "I am their salvation!"--the last is directed by the serial killer to a tied-up Ramon, who can't seem to raise the argument: "If you're killing them to save them, then why do you have to torture them first?" Hard (R; 102 min.), directed by John Huckert and written by Huckert and John Matkowsky, photographed by Matkowsky and starring Noel Palomaria and Malcolm Moorman, opens Friday at the Towne Theater in San Jose. [ San Jose | Metroactive Central | Archives ]