A mangled collision of opposing forces—fact and fiction, camp and polemic, playful eroticism and cardboard talking heads—Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald's ill-conceived Beefcake works only as a runway for massive, finely chiseled blocks of male flesh. Inspired by a potentially fascinating subject, Fitzgerald delves into the blatantly homoerotic subculture of '50s muscle magazines, which purported to celebrate men's health and fitness but wound up appealing to more prurient interests. Combining real-life interviews with dramatic reenactments, the film charts the rise and fall of Bob Mizer, a photographer who created the popular magazine Physique Pictorial from his basement. As played with giddy naiveté by Daniel MacIvor, Mizer watches his work evolve from its ostensible purpose as an agency for clean-living male models to a fantasy world for the sexually repressed. In an entirely fictionalized role, Joshua Peace is a fresh-faced Nova Scotian innocent with Hollywood dreams who is shocked and eventually transformed by Mizer's hedonistic influence. Beefcake strains to mimic the bubble-gum kitsch of a John Waters comedy, constantly mooning the period's straight-laced suburban conservatism with predictable results. Some of the interview subjects, including fitness guru Jack LaLanne and notorious Andy Warhol star Joe D'Allesandro, introduce a more serious agenda on obscenity laws and First Amendment privileges, but their segments seem oddly disconnected from the whole. Whatever its intent, Beefcake's chief appeal is exactly the same as Mizer's magazine, trotting out one greased-up, toothy Adonis after another with a mechanical regularity that recalls nothing less than Orgy Of The Dead, Ed Wood's hilariously stultifying ode to the female form.