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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 homosexual 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
Login![Otto; Or, Up With Dead People [US Import] [Region 1] [NTSC]](https://i9.lisimg.com/image/products/280/B001L1CNFC/dvds/B001L1CNFC.jpg "Otto; Or, Up With Dead People [US Import] [Region 1] [NTSC]")
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