NOVELIST JAMES ROBERT Baker lost a battle with suicidal depression in 1997. The titles of his books (Adrenaline, Anarchy, Testosterone, etc.) give a good idea of their mood-swinging, genre-crunching mix of outré sex, black comedy, and pulp thrills. It's a blend that completely fails to translate in director and co-scenarist David Moreton's adaptation of Testosterone, which is crafted with basic competence but is so disastrously "off" – each scene phonier than the last – you can't even tell what the filmmakers intended most of the time. David Sutcliffe plays hunky graphic novelist Dean, who gets bent out of shape when his even hunkier boyfriend, Pablo (Antonio Sabato Jr.), suddenly disappears without a word. Dean flies to Argentina, where he's led on a rather deadening wild-goose chase by Pablo's rich-bitch mother (Sonia Braga, in drag-queen dragon lady mode) and several folks with hidden agendas, including (what else?) numerous hunky young men. The film trades in smoldering-passion-Latino clichés while seeming to share Dean's Ugly American attitude toward the "third-world shithole" he's stuck traipsing around (he's actually irked people in Argentina speak Spanish). It may be the terribly "straight-acting" actor's fault that our hero comes off as world-class, Stephen Baldwin-level boorish rather than crazy in love or (eventually) just crazy. But Moreton – stretched way too far from the psychological home turf of his excellent debut feature, Edge of Seventeen – must shoulder blame for the film's forced jauntiness, implausibility, purple dialogue, and ersatz eroticism. Those elements might have cohered into something enjoyably over-the-top under the watch of a Pedro Almodóvar or Bigas Luna. Testosterone misses the mark by so far, it almost – alas, only almost – lands in so-bad-it's-good territory. Two nice things: a fleeting but definite glimpse of the Sabato family jewels and the immortal line "Anyone can cum on a tree!" Which leaves just one hour, 45 minutes, and 50 seconds that totally misfire. (Dennis Harvey)