Jim's Film Festival Diary for Sunday July 20th

Film: Otto; or, Up with Dead People

Future Screening: None

Again, life got in the way and I ended up seeing only one other festival movie this weekend. And I'm afraid it may be my last this year. But hey, there's always next year!

Otto; or, Up with Dead People
Hey, it's another movie with two titles and an "or" between them! And actually, I could give the film yet another title: That Gay Zombie Movie. It's a German/Canadian co-production, starring mostly German actors speaking in accented English, written and directed by outrageous filmmaker Bruce La Bruce, and it opens up with a young gay man named Otto (Jey Crisfar) digging his way out of his own grave, now a zombie with pretty much no memory of his former life. Accompanying this is an opening narration describing a world of the near future where zombies are not commonplace, but are at least unextraordinary. And most of them are also gay and reasonably intelligent (a veritable "gay zombie plague"). The narration is delivered to us by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus), and it's unclear whether it's meant to be describing the world of the zombie films-within-a-film that she's making, or the film itself. It's also ultimately unclear whether Otto is even really a zombie, or just a regular guy with some serious mental problems (and an impressive resistance to the various diseases you can contract from eating raw meat). As Yarn herself points out, maybe it's all just a metaphor.

The point is, the concept—a gay zombie stumbling out of his grave and into the city and then showing up at a casting call for an independent film about gay zombies and immediately getting the part thanks to his impressive method acting—is hilarious, and it's handled in a pretty hilarious way. Filmmaker Medea Yarn is a very funny parody of a rather insufferable, pretentious, left-wing radical political independent filmmaker. She's obsessed with death, pushes her actors around like cattle, and has a goth girlfriend named Hella Bent (Susanne Sachße) who is constantly filmed as if she's in a silent movie, complete with scratchy, flickering black-and-white film, a goofy piano soundtrack, and title cards for her dialogue. Even Yarn's movies are wonderful parodies of pretentious underground films; La Bruce goes so far as to insert references to films by surrealist filmmaker Maya Deren. Crisfar's Otto, meanwhile, is just as interesting and amusing. He mostly does a lot of shambling around and sitting motionless, but he does it well, as a form of physical comedy, and while he doesn't speak all that often (which is just as well, as his German accented-English is a bit awkward), he still manages to work in some reasonably strong acting, especially in the scenes where the memories of his life begin to come back to him. In fact, Otto's story of self-exploration and discovery is surprisingly touching, especially for a movie with a number of gross-out zombie sequences, including not only the usual intestine eating, but also a bloody gay zombie orgy and another outrageous gay zombie sex scene that I won't even describe (click through to the festival program description if you're curious). The soundtrack is noisy and avant garde, but often quite effective.

As mentioned before, like most zombie movies, this one is using zombies as a metaphor for something. In this case, the zombie isn't a metaphor for brainless conformists (as it is in previous installments in the genre by George Romero), but for the opposite: rebels seeking an escape from conforming. The zombies also seem to be symbols for gay people in general. But whatever they stand for, they're in a pretty imaginative, funny, and effective film here.
Festival rating: Very Good

Image Credit: Flickr user pedrosimoes7