Otto; or Up with Dead People, 2008

I want to preface this with the fact that I am not the best person to discuss a Bruce LaBruce film. I’ve never seen one before this, and they’re outside my area of interest. That being said, Otto; or Up with Dead People is an underseen queer horror staple, and that’s what this marathon is all about. For a little more context on the career of Bruce LaBruce, for those completely unfamiliar with his work, check out this slideshow he put together. The basic plot of Otto; or Up with Dead People revolves around a zombie named Otto who is roaming around Berlin and is discovered by a filmmaker who begins making a documentary about him. The filmmaker believes Otto is actually not a zombie and is instead mentally ill. The site Gay Essential discusses what inspired Bruce LaBruce to make the film:

“Multi-talented Bruce LaBruce is also a photographer and DJ. The unique style of his previous work is also present in his zombie flick, as the director stated that what inspired him to create Otto; or Up with Dead People was a sense of “heavy alienation”. Moreover, the decision to start up the production came after a friend of his, who happened to work for a suicide hotline, drew attention to the fact that the suicide rates for gay teens are higher than those of any other group.”

The sense of alienation certainly comes out in the film, but many other themes are convoluted and hard to parse out. I found Otto to be pretty hard to watch for this reason. I’m going to let Eric Henderson of Slant talk about his interpretation of the film:

“They don’t come more internally conflicted than Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People (or, Dead People Get It Up). It seems the gay, Canadian provocateur nec plus ultra, having spent much of his career in film and still photography unapologetically reveling in rough trade, has finally pinned his bloody, queer heart on his sleeve. And he doesn’t appear to know exactly why. Otto is garlanded with as much sex, blood, leftist dogma and real-life porn stars (the Teutonically ravishing Marcel Schlutt, in fine fettle) as you’d expect from the filmmaker whose last movie, The Raspberry Reich, spawned the immortal catchphrase “the revolution is my boyfriend.” But despite the fact that the main character is a twink zombie who eats roadkill and cock in about equal measure, LaBruce’s empathetic twist is that gay sex does not in itself imply a political statement, at least not so far as Otto is concerned. Quite simply, Otto’s catatonic state is the inevitable byproduct of an apparently puppy-cute case of young love ending prematurely. When Otto’s droopy-eyed, olive-skinned boy runs out on him in his hour of need, Otto takes the “can’t go on living” cliché to its natural end. That said, zombiedom does stand in as a metaphor for dormant political activism for Medea Yarn, a militant, morose lesbian filmmaker. Yarn’s film within a film positions gay zombies as the vital army of underground sentiment, a savage but humanistic counterpoint to (North American) mankind’s disposable existence. Somewhere between these two positions—psychological isolation and civic disruption—is LaBruce’s own skeptical take, in which scenes of gay zombie orgies are bluntly juxtaposed with images of meat being cut from the bone. (Thematically, it’s somewhere between the bathhouse nightmare sequence of Another Gay Sequel and the anti-consumerism Bible that is Dawn of the Dead.) Though Otto, like any horny fag diving headfirst into a sea of men, tackles more than it can handle, everyone in the movie gets theirs. Otto momentarily rejoins the land of the living, Yarn (after years of filmmaking) finally gets to bark “that’s a wrap,” and her all-male cast gets to wallow in each other’s juices. For a movie with this many ideological loose ends, Otto comes up with a convincingly sweet resolution” (2009).

I can’t say that I recommend Otto; or Up with Dead People. It wasn’t fun or enjoyable for me. However, if you’re interested in this kind of transgressive, experimental, gay filmmaking from Bruce LaBruce, you may like this one.