MUFF to screen banned gay zombie porn film
Following the banning of Canadian director Bruce LaBruce’s gay zombie porn film L.A. Zombie from the Melbourne International Film Festival, a secret screening of the film will be held on Sunday, August 29 as part of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF).
The film follows a homeless schizophrenic who wanders the streets of Los Angeles looking for male corpses, who he returns to to life by having sex with them.
Movie-goers wishing to see L.A. Zombie can join a Facebook group where the location of the screening will be announced 24 hours beforehand.
Having screened banned films before, notably 2003 film Ken Park, MUFF director Richard Wolstencroft said police sent to the screenings generally don’t want to be there and feel they have better things to do.
Wolstencroft said that L.A. Zombie gaining the tagline ‘gay zombie porn’ has helped fuel controversy, allowing its critics to claim the film has ‘gone too far’. He said that the Australian Classification Board occasionally singles out films such as L.A. Zombie to generate publicity, and that this may have been a political decision.
“I think it has been picked on because of the gay factor — you don’t know how much this has got to do with the election. I think if this was a zombie film where a zombie rapes a woman I don’t think that it would have got the same level of attention.”
Wolstencroft argues that L.A. Zombie isn’t much more intense than LaBruce’s last film, Otto; Or, Up with Dead People, which screened at MIFF in 2008 largely without controversy.
“It’s slightly more intense — the horror elements have been ramped up a bit, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the hardcore version, Bruce LaBruce tells me.”
Following film festival releases of the edited version of L.A. Zombie, a hardcore version will be marketed to the gay porn industry.
“He is one of the most important queer filmmakers”, Wolstencroft said of LaBruce.
He argues that the director’s shift towards pornography is a logical one. He said LaBruce met with Gaspar Noé, director of the controversial French film Irréversible, who told LaBruce that he also saw pornography as the next step for transgressive cinema.
By Benjamin Riley
info: L.A. Zombie will screen at 9pm on Sunday, August 29, location to be announced via the Facebook event ‘Secret screening of Bruce LaBruce’s banned L.A.Zombie!’.
