Concessions to the audience's expectations certainly make Otto a more palatable viewing experience, but they also make it seem less dangerous.
Otto; Or, Up with Dead People (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:17
Fresh:6
Rotten:11
Average Rating:4.8/10
Synopsis: Otto is a handsome, sensitive, neo-Goth zombie with an identity crisis. He looks and smells like a zombie but isn't certain that he is one. He wanders the streets of the city, never sleeping, until... Otto is a handsome, sensitive, neo-Goth zombie with an identity crisis. He looks and smells like a zombie but isn't certain that he is one. He wanders the streets of the city, never sleeping, until one day--as he is being harassed by hooligans--he ducks into an alley and spots a poster announcing auditions for a zombie film. He soon meets aspiring filmmaker/revolutionary Medea Yarn, who is convinced that Otto, as a confused zombie, is the perfect embodiment of the effects of advanced capitalism on individuals. Medea begins to make a film about Otto, while simultaneously shooting a film about a gay zombie revolt against consumerist society. After moving in with an actor, Otto begins to remember fragments of his pre-zombie life with a sweet boyfriend. As Medea directs the final, orgiastic scene of her gay zombie film, Otto struggles to access the human emotions buried beneath his zombie exterior. Otto; or, Up with Dead People is a clever modern fable about alienation and the problems created by a mass-produced society, where even the members most on the fringe find it hard to resist being pulled into the mainstream. Toying with genre conventions, combining different media, and making use of Medea's often-humorous films-within-the-film, Bruce LaBruce creates a new, sexy, hyperpoliticized zombie mythology. -- © Sundance Film Festival [More]
Starring: Jey Crisfar, Gio Black Peter, Katharina Klewinghaus, Marcel Schlutt
Starring: Jey Crisfar, Gio Black Peter, Katharina Klewinghaus, Marcel Schlutt, Susanne Sachsse
Director: Bruce LaBruce
Director: Bruce LaBruce
Screenwriter: Bruce LaBruce
Producer: Robert Bruning, Bruce LaBruce, Jorn Hartmann, Jennifer Jonas, Michael Huber
Composer: Mikael Karlsson
Studio: Strand Releasing
Reviews for Otto; Or, Up with Dead People
Sadly, this is one of those moments where I have to scan my reviewer's list of dismissive nouns to come up with the perfect word to describe this mess. Ah, yes, here it is: claptrap.
Moviegoers with a LaBruce fetish will appreciate another imaginative offering from the filmmaker. Mainstream audiences should stay far, far away.
Otto deliriously intermingles sex and entrails but is also imaginative and witty
LaBruce's film is such a riot of conflicting information and signifying styles that inner logic never really gets a grip.
Some have described this as more cohesive than most Bruce La Bruce movies, but it's still sophomoric junk.
LaBruce devotees will be tickled pink; others will be perplexed and/or disgusted.
One of the more disciplined entries in the LaBruce oeuvre, Otto is sexy and silly in just the right proportions, a cult item with a real heart.
Calling a zombie movie lifeless is bad enough. But when the charge is leveled at a gay zombie movie by Bruce LaBruce, queer cinema’s most radical fairy, the disappointment cuts that much deeper.
Campy but not comical, reactionary but not very clever, LaBruce's film is best saved for those tickled by the sight of homo-zombie orgies or the hardcore penetration of an open wound.
For a movie with this many ideological loose ends, Otto comes up with a convincingly sweet resolution.
Veers between raw zombie cuisine, raw gay porn, high calorie sex that includes entrails-devouring as foreplay, and cranky anti-establishment rants against advanced capitalism. Not to mention that it's hard out there for a zombie too.
When the viscera and seminal fluids are cleared away, there is something less flagrant but more durable resembling a beating heart inside this bloody stump of a movie -- a coded message to do with loneliness and loss.
Bruce La Bruce's latest offering is a deadly affair of heavily politicized metaphors that overflows with imagination, angst and a smattering of good old fashioned porn.
Canadian queer-cinema provocateur Bruce LaBruce continues his trademark blend of sexual explicitness and shoddy technique with his numbing necro-porno, Otto; or, Up With Dead People.
Latest News for Otto; Or, Up with Dead People
February 13, 2009:
Veers between raw zombie cuisine, raw gay porn, high calorie sex that includes entrails-devouring as foreplay, and cranky anti-establishment rants against advanced capitalism. Not to mention that it's hard out there for a zombie too. ![]()
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February 08, 2009:
Veers between raw zombie cuisine, raw gay porn, high calorie sex that includes entrails-devouring as foreplay, and cranky anti-establishment rants against advanced capitalism. Not to mention that it's hard out there for a zombie too. ![]()
More...
November 01, 2008:
Veers between raw zombie cuisine, raw gay porn, high calorie sex that includes entrails-devouring as foreplay, and cranky anti-establishment rants against advanced capitalism. Not to mention that it's hard out there for a zombie too. ![]()
More...
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