Bruce LaBruce is not, strictly speaking, a good filmmaker. Ask his fans, even, or consult the work of his influences (Waters, Losey, Godard, Jack Smith — dazzling hacks, the lot of them). And so Otto; or, Up With Dead People has a certain, rarefied stench; it ought to, as it is — more so, arguably, than any of the man’s previous films — a summa on the LaBrucean project, on being LaBruce. It’s also an undead, “gay zombie porn” film as the media at Sundance called it last January. What else indeed to call something as simultaneously self-indulgent and self-excoriating as this?
Truth is, Otto is only gay zombie porn after a fashion. Its titular hero (Jey Crisfar) hitches a ride to Berlin to escape his zombie anomie and eventually ends up in the clutches of Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus) a polemical director trying to finish her own, years-in-the-making gay zombie epic called, you guessed it, Up With Dead People. As LaBruce’s film unfolds, it becomes apparent that most of it is, in fact, Medea’s, a twist as clever as it is evasive. (Is the Two or Three Things I Know About Her coffee-cup riff proof of his or his avatar’s pretensions?)
Most notable is the lack of sustained porn in Otto and its dabbling in teen melodrama. (If there ever were a LaBruce film you could take your gay nephew to, it’s this one.) Yet the climax of the film (Medea’s as well as LaBruce’s) remains a gorgeously filmed zombie orgy which is crosscut, Eisenstein-style, with shots of butchered meat. No one does tasteful tastelessness quite like LaBruce.