Mormon lusts

This is rather jolly: Men on a Mission.

It's a religious take on that old beefcake calendar idea. Except here we have topless Mormon missionaries.

They are living proof that crap clothes and rubbish haircuts can go a long way to concealing the hotness underneath.

Although we've all seen the cute gay love story Latter Days, so we probably knew the truth already.

The truth is, some of these men are really rather fanciable (apart from their crap religion, of course).

The truth was rather harder to find in Errol Morris's sparkling new documentary Tabloid.

It tells the news story from 1978 of the "beauty queen", Joyce McKinney, who followed the unfortunate object of her lusts to England where he was a Mormon missionary and, famously, kidnapped him, drove him to a remote farmhouse in Devon where she chained him to a bed and raped him.

The story was a tabloid's wet dream, especially as ever more lurid details began to emerge -- including the fact that the fragrant Joyce, who had presented herself as a selfless, nun-like creature seeking to rescue her beau from a mind-mangling cult, was, in the earlier part of her life, an S&M/bondage mistress and porn star.

The "innocent" Joyce was let out of prison on bail, and proceeded to flee the country disguised as a deaf and dumb actor in a large party headed for Canada.

The film is gripping and funny and tragic in equal measure, giving Joyce free rein to tell her own fantasist's, Narcissist's story of what a tragic victim she really is. Sometimes I felt appalled at myself for intruding into this salacious newspaper story, at others I felt it was an important film that dissects just how fucked-up we are by the ridiculous fantasies we spin to ourselves. Great cinema.