Product Description
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Otto is a handsome, sensitive, neo-Goth gay zombie with an
identity crisis. He wanders the streets of the city, never
ing, until one day he auditions for a zombie film. The
director, an eccentric bohemain, begins making a film about Otto,
while simultaneously shooting a film about a gay zombie revolt
against consumerist society. As the final, orgiastic scene of the
film is being , Otto struggles to access the human emotions
buried beneath his zombie exterior.
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Bruce LaBruce’s feature Otto; Or, Up With Dead People will
either thrill or repulse, as it is tailored to the rather
specific sexual tastes that this art film director has spent his
career elucidating. Otto does, however, vary from pornographic
past LaBruce fetish films such as The Raspberry Reich and Skin
Gang in that Otto will appeal to camp horror experts and those
interested in conceptual links between abjection, fashion, and
desire. As LaBruce fans may suspect, Otto; Or, Up With Dead
People has a far-fetched plot that exists seemingly to provide
framework for his visual explorations of sexual identity. In
it, a young, sexy zombie, Otto (Jey Crisfar), wanders Berlin
streets until filmmaker Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus), whose
name is Maya Deren with a twist, casts Otto in her upcoming
zombie flick. Paired with actor Fritz Fritze (Marcel Schlutt),
the viewer wonders throughout if Otto is a true zombie or another
actor amongst the several he is filmed with. In this, there is
the constant meta-film, an external narrative that asks the
viewer to assess one’s own willingness to believe in monsters.
With the help of her brother/DP, Adolf (Guido Sommer), and her
girlfriend, Hella Bent (Susanne Sachse), who appears only in
vintage looking, black and white footage as if she’s a ghost
transmitting from the past, Medea directs Otto in various
insalubrious settings, such as the Berlin dump. The effect is
humorous and extremely odd. Not until Otto dials up ex-boyfriend,
Rudolf, to meet on a park bench does one begin to understand the
roots of Otto’s past, which has led to existential crisis.
Structurally, the film is quite scenic and abstract, and its
cool soundtrack, which includes CocoRosie and Antony and the
Johnsons, reinforces the music video, Kenneth Anger aspect of
this stylistic movie. Several times throughout, in fact, are mock
mentions of the high fashion industry’s vampiric way of thieving
style away from those who wear clothes as sincere expression.
Zombie fashion, in Otto’s world, is totally in. While the plot
falls in an out of focus, scenes lend a picturesque, dream-like
setting to several recognizable Berlin hotspots, such as the
abandoned amusement park, Spreewald, and the Badeschiff along the
Spree River. This is to say that as much as Otto; Or, Up With
Dead People is a horror film, it also captures and meditates on
trends in current fashion and art communities. As mentioned
before, there is less sex in this feature than in LaBruce’s
previous, yet a warning should be issued that the erotic scenes
in Otto are straight-up gruesome, porno-updates of Herschell
Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast and other gore fests. --Trinie Dalton