Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008)

Fresh and Exciting

As Good As It Gets

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

LaBruce, makes an attempt at being edgy, ironic, and satirical… but what he delivers is an uninspired, poorly written, poorly acted, poorly edited waste of time.Firstly, I don't know what's more offensive… The fact that LaBruce exploits the struggle for LGBT rights, by using it as an obvious crutch to deflect criticism of his depictions of vile and unconscionable acts of violence and necrophilia, or how badly he misses the mark and twists what could have been a brilliant metaphor, into something you could imagine being shown in the basement of the Providence Road Baptist Church. Then again, it could be his sad attempt at a parody of post-modern nihilism, which also shows not a spark of insight, and instead of skewering the genre, he just parrots it.Whatever his intent, LaBruce misses irony by miles and wouldn't know satire if Groucho Marx shoved a copy of Huckleberry Finn straight up the orifice from which he originally pulled the screenplay for this film.His ironic metaphor, to take mainstream societies rejection of homosexuality and place it parallel to the gristly abomination that zombies represent in fiction; *could* have been brilliant, but his half-hearted effort lets it fall flat and as dead as his protagonist. The real horror here is the result of LaBruce's failure to show any irony at all in this metaphor, or prove it false. Instead, he actually drains all the humanity out of his story and actors, the very characteristic that would give lie to the idea that homosexuals are monstrous abominations that defile human flesh, what's more, he adds fuel to the stereotype by having his characters devalue, exploit, and abuse one another casually.One may be tempted to forgive LaBruce, his blatant exploitation, since this film is a excuse for pornography, disguised as social commentary, disguised as art. It could even be ignored that LaBruce feels free to dispense with the character development, continuity of plot, dialog, humor, or even context that might make this movie bearable… that is, if this really was pornography… but even at that LaBruce fails miserably.What's more tedious than watching some lifeless derivative piece of art house drivel? Why, it's watching an *insincere* rendition of that same lifeless derivative piece of art house drivel; where only the most obtuse and predictable observations are made as satire and then we are expected to find them profound and witty. LaBruce attempts to mock the genre… but does so in such an artless way he becomes part of it. Like two mimes pretending to be mirror images of one another…only that's not the best description, because the mimes may accidentally entertain you… unlike this film.I would recommend this film to anyone who has survived the zombie apocalypse in actual fact. After mankind is wiped out and all his works have fallen to ruin, watching this film would ease the sense of loss. One could shrug and say… "the culture that produced this is dead and gone… good riddance." Think you Mr. LaBruce, for giving us all just one more reason to be ashamed of humanity. Well done.

In short, this movie is just as odd as its premise makes it sound. A young homosexual zombie wandering around, isn't exactly a premise for an everyday movie but then again "Otto; or, Up with Dead People" isn't your average everyday movie. It's something unique and original and you will most likely either love it or hate it. Me personally; I quite liked it.Above all things, this is a movie that is taking a very artistic approach. Watching this is a true special experience. Visually its a great looking movie, that is being quite creative and seemed to be full with great ideas. Now, granted that not everything works out well or interesting but overall "Otto; or, Up with Dead People" remains a good watch throughout.You shouldn't take everything in this movie too literally. Seems to me that its entire main concept was a metaphor how lots of people still look upon homosexuals and how they treat them. In lots of places they are still being seen as not normal, to put it mildly and as meat 'eating' animals. That's why the main character of the movie feels like- or thinks he is a freak, or a zombie in this case. At least that's how I interpret things. But who knows, maybe you will get something totally different out of this movie. But fact remains that this is a very homosexual orientated movie and everything revolves around this.This also means that the movie is not just showing kissing men but also some far more explicit moments. There is a fair amount of male nudity and even a couple of graphic sex sequences, involving male characters.The entire movie was obviously quite cheap to make but I think that director Bruce La Bruce did a great job with his material. The way he shot the movie makes it almost irrelevant that it has a quite cheap look to it. It's directed with lots of class, which often makes the movie a visually great one to experience.Don't watch this movie expecting a lot of story though. There isn't really a clear main point to the movie and the movie is more about its underlying messages. Some movies however can do just fine without a clear main story, as this greatly artistic- and as such an effective, movie demonstrates.Still some stuff just remains too odd and distracting. Such as for instance the fact that basically every character the main characters comes across turns out to be an homosexual, male of female. Seriously, what kind of world was this movie supposed to be set in, since you clearly can't call it a realistic one.It also seems odd that this is a German movie, with mostly German actors, speaking all in English. Don't know what's the entire story behind this but it just seems to me that it's more easy for Bruce La Bruce to make movies in Germany but he still wants to reach an international audience, so he wrote and shot all of the dialog in English. This means you can hear a lot of thick accents throughout the movie.Call me weird but I for most part quite liked this movie!7/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Bruce La Bruce film is a brilliant analysis of contemporary displaced people, individuals who live on the margins of society, groups that struggle to obtain validation of either legal or social nature."Otto" is the story of an outcast teenager. Now, there would be nothing original about this except for one detail: In a world in which the living dead are humanity's recurrent plague, Otto is a boy that defines himself as a non flesh-eating zombie with an identity crisis.From the very beginning, the viewer is aware of a narration inside a narration, in a way that would be comparable to Propst literary models. "Up with Dead People" is the movie that lesbian intellectual Medea is filming, with references to Hélène Cixous views on the essential bisexuality of L'ecriture femenine, as well as Irigaray's Speculum of the other Woman (the mirroring of the female body surmounts feminist theory in this film as Hella, Medea's girlfriend, can only appear on screen as a black and white image from old reels of 1910-1920 movies, thus enabling a parallel between these two women and even classic and contemporary cinema).In the first scene Otto rises from the grave, a classic image that has transcended the 7th art and has forever become part of popular culture. Ever since Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) filmmakers have toyed with one of humanity's most fierily rooted fears: death or rather the question "what happens after Death?". Romero and others have also explored the living dead as a metaphor of social marginality and the reification of the subaltern thus creating one of the most fascinating sub-genres in film's history.This film proudly assumes this cultural heritage and builds upon it. As the narrator's voice tell us in the first scenes, these dead people have little or nothing to do with the classic flesh-eating, brain-devouring zombie. Those who are alive judge them as "An echo of their own somnambulistic conformist behavior". Normal society is exposed as a tyrannical Lacanian "Great Other", a Great Other that demands adaptation or extinction. Insofar heterosexual normative is carried out the Great Other is satisfied. The symbolic order, that which constitutes what one would perceive as "reality", can never suppress the "real" (id est, the obstacle of the symbolic order). But the real can only exist after the symbolic order (which relies greatly on language, the widest symbolization process known) has been fully inserted in everyone's mind. Then, it's only logical that zombies are finally able to reclaim language and reasoning. If zombies were the outsiders of past decades, they are now entities that can never fit in and that are constantly aware of their own situation. What can be more destabilizing for the heterosexual normative than homosexuality taken to the extreme?, in this case, a new wave of gay zombies that prey upon male flesh, in a very carnal and literal way.Otto lives, or unlives, eating animals instead of humans. He runs away from those who would seek to harm him. And he finds a way to define himself thanks to Medea and her movie which is full of theory references. As Medea's brother so aptly confirms, here the subject is "the empty signifier upon which you could project any particular gender".Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory derives from Levi-Strauss structuralism (after Saussure and Jacobson linguistic studies). They would affirm that certain structures have invariably persisted in humanity's development. One of such structures is the dual nature of language. When Saussure defined langue and parole he decided that the entire language was nothing more than a system of signs, signs that had arbitrary value and that would only have meaning in their relation with other signs. If so, the human language can only exist in a dual system of opposition (signifier / signified: signifier as the acoustic image generated by an idea or object and signified as the word in any given language that is utilized to retrieve that acoustic image from our memory). This fundamental duality has its first manifestation in sexual gender (males versus females). And as Lacan explains, the first structure one encounters as one enters into the world is that of sex, one is either a man or a woman, no one can be both or neither. Or at least that's what heterosexual normative would have us believe. There is no place for a third sex and has never been one, hermaphrodites and other variants have been utterly discarded by psychoanalytic theory.Lacan, nonetheless, accepts in his sexuation graphic that being a woman doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the female position or that being a man doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the male position. He also accepts that the male and female positions have evolved through history and adapted to social requirements, being a man or being a woman, as gender affiliated roles, is a sign of arbitrariness, in the sense that there is nothing human that can be defined as a masculine or feminine behavior. Everything is a social construction. And as such is an empty signifier. Gender roles are different now compared to recent centuries, or even decades, and they keep changing. Nothing is set in stone.Does "Otto" attempt to disrupt the Lacanian structure? Otto has experienced idealized love (indisputably visible in his flashbacks as a living boy), savage and destructive sex with a costumed gay that thinks Otto is disguised as a zombie, and the possibility of a more complete relationship with Fritz, the movie star. He deals with the masculine position in his first love, he assumes sex as the ultimate manifestation of a consumer-based capitalist world (to consume and cannibalize are here synonyms), and finally accepts the failure to insert himself into society (after his brief relationship with Fritz) and wanders towards the north, hoping to find people like him, hoping to find, perhaps, a Utopian gay civilization in which the living and non-living can finally divert their basic and seemingly irreconcilable natures.

b-grade gay zombie porn semi-mockumentary. repetitive, irritating sound design, jokes milked longer than they should. for some, there's not enough blood and guts. for others, there's not enough porn.But all LaBruce's films are bad! that is his charm and the charm of no-budget Cult Films! if you expect more, you won't be alone. but if you expect perfection, then you're a fool. like all those people who complained after seeing Tomb Raider or the Super Mario Brothers Movie - what did you expect?Otto is fun. it's certainly original. it's gay politics are obvious, but accurate. the jokes range from falling flat to funny to shocking. it's polarizing, memorable and thanks to Fritz (Marcel Schlutt), it's damn sexy to watch. Otto needs to be watched at a film festival amongst the typical gay indie films that are more sincere than their film makers can give credit to. Only then will something like SkinFlick's 'monkey rape' and Hustler White 'Stumping' hit you with the full impact that it shouldlike SkinGang - can't wait for the full-porno version of Otto