The Living End

The Living End follows Jon, a semi-employed film critic, and Luke, a hustler, two young men in Los Angeles who have both just learned they are HIV-positive. With nothing left to hold them back, they take to the road together, drifting across the country and leaving a trail of crime behind them as their relationship shifts between intimacy, conflict and violence. Gregg Araki wrote and directed the film, which was released in 1992 and runs eighty-five minutes.

Araki's second feature arrived early in his career, before The Doom Generation, Nowhere and Mysterious Skin. It belongs to the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, responding to the AIDS crisis with anger and dark humor rather than sentiment. The cast is led by Mike Dytri as Luke and Craig Gilmore as Jon, with Mark Finch, Mary Woronov, Johanna Went and Darcy Marta in supporting roles; twenty-two performers are credited in total. Jon Gerrans and Marcus Hu produced for Desperate Pictures and Strand Releasing.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.6 out of 10 from around 4,500 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.7 out of 10 from a much smaller base of 98 votes, indicating a modest but enduring reputation among viewers decades after its release.