L.A. Zombie

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2010

L.A. Zombie
Bruce LaBruce
GERMANY/USA/FRANCE, 2010
No Dialogue 63 minutes Colour/HDCAM
Production Company: Wurstfilm GmbH/Dark Alley Media
Producer: Bruce LaBruce, Arno Rok, Robert Felt, Maciek Dziekiewicz, Damian Todaro, Jiirgen Briining, Jorn Hartmann
Screenplay: Bruce LaBruce
Cinematographer: James Carman
Editor: Jorm Hartmann
Production Designer: Steve Hall
Music: Kevin D. Hoover
Principal Cast: Francois Sagat
Production: Wurstfilm GmbH

Let’s get a few things out of the way. L.A. Zombie is a hardcore gay porn film. There are numerous scenes of men having graphic sex, shot in the manner of pornography, not art-film erotica. The film also continues Bruce LaBruce’s longstanding love affair with genre, with plenty of low-tech, half-eaten corpses, lots of spurting blood and a most unusually-shaped zombie penis that dominates the film’s psycho-sexual world. Fair warning?

But L.A. Zombie is very much an art film, too. In fact, it is one of the most poignant films about dashed expectations and the ennui of poverty I can recall by a Canadian filmmaker. Its tone in some ways recalls LaBruce's revelatory first film, No Skin Off My Ass, but trades in LaBruce's hairdresser persona for a more fractured narrative gaze, a perspective borne from the city itself and reminiscent of Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient. This sets L.A. Zombie far apart from LaBruce’s last ten years of hardcore work, which has tended to strike a satirical, confrontational tone, perhaps most notably in his agitprop phenomenon The Raspberry Reich.

Aesthetically, L.A. Zombie is a most unusual hybrid. Although LaBruce has been working in digital video since starting to make more sexually explicit work, he had yet to achieve the same cinematographic impact of the stunning black-and-white photography of Super 8½ or the seventies underground aesthetic of Hustler White. L.A. Zombie changes that. LaBruce uses the digital medium to stretch the Los Angeles landscape, using its endless sunsets and radioactive, yellow glow to create an uneasy tone of penniless decadence. Long shots are held for maximum imaginative power and the film plays out in near silence. In many respects, L.A. Zombie feels like an update of and tribute to Joe Gage’s revolutionary late-seventies gay porn trilogy, which, in my mind, is among the finest set of films made in any genre.
—Noah Cowan