Otto; or Up With Dead People

And its winning awards! From Mr. LaBruce himself:


Hey Kids: so fyi my new movie Otto; or, Up with Dead People just won the Visions Award at the Rio De Janeiro Fantastic Film Festival (Riofan). This award is conceded by a jury of cinema students to the best film in the Visions Section of the festival, dedicated to independent and radical films, with an experimental/auteurist approach to the horror/sci-fi/fantasy genres.






Now I don't care much for awards, but this one was kind of cool because a) I didn't even know my movie was playing there; b) it was voted by film students; and c) it was sort of vindication for having the film turned down by some other fantasy film festivals because they can't handle zombie horror mixed with tender gay love. Cretins! Otto will also be showing in July at the Puchon Fantasy Film Festival in South Korea, which I will likely be attending, and it will be in competition at the Sitges Fantasy Film Festival in Spain in October, which I will attend for sure.

Stay tuned!

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Opening in NY THIS WEEKEND! Reviews are wildly mixed but it got a rave in the NYT and at Salon.com:

Is the hero of Bruce LaBruce's "Otto; or, Up With Dead People" really a rotting zombie who has crawled out of the grave to feast on the flesh of the living? Or just a sweet, misunderstood gay boy rebelling against corrupt, hetero-fascist late capitalism? Well, it'd be cheating to tell you. And it would also presume that I knew the answer. For Canadian queercore pioneer LaBruce, whose movies ("No Skin Off My Ass," "The Raspberry Reich") exist in that nebulous zone between underground film, gay porn and John Waters-esque self-mocking hipster shtick, Otto's sexual identity (and degree of undeadness) is fluid, unfixed and polymorphous.

Stumbling through the streets of Berlin in filthy Comme des Garçons wear and smelling increasingly gamey, Otto (the fittingly skinny and affectless Jey Crisfar) becomes the star of an idiotic lesbian filmmaker's zombie flick-cum-political allegory, dining on pigeons and cats in a futile effort to quench his cravings for human flesh. On one level, LaBruce is eager to offend and outrage all possible viewers, from mainstream liberals to gay guardians of politically correct expression to self-serious underground artists. But in between his disappointing encounters with would-be lovers and gay-bashers, Otto is just lookin' for love in all the wrong places. Be he alive or be he undead. (Now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and opens Nov. 28 in Los Angeles, with other cities to follow.)



― Andrew O'Hehir

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