L.A. Zombie

Undoubtedly, zombie and hardcore porn flicks have a lot in common aesthetically, as both rely on careless cardboard cinema conventions and wallow in depicting the human body in a most unflattering manner that reminds one that humans are essentially just pieces of meat and no different from the sort one devours from a fast food restaurant, so it should be no surprise that some filmmakers have decided to combine the two typically artistically meritless film styles, with iconoclastic queercore auteur Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass, The Raspberry Reich) being probably the most famous director to do it. Beginning with his melancholy pomo homo zombie arthouse-splatter flick Otto; or Up with Dead People (2008)—easily one of the director’s most ambitious and aesthetically and thematically unhinged works to date—LaBruce followed his frolicsome flesheater fuck flick with L.A. Zombie (2010), a grandly grotesque work of zany zombie hardcore that was advertised with a poster playfully parodying the iconic poster used from George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Of course, in its deleteriously disgusting depiction of a primitive looking brute with a monster prick who literally fucks people back to life in an act of ostensible altruism, L.A. Zombie is anything but a Romero flick, even if it features superficially symbolic social commentary of the far-left sort as a work that pays sympathy towards homeless people and homos. Starring Slovak-French gay porn star François Sagat (Saw VI, SAGAT: The Documentary)—a Cro-Magnon-like cocksucking creep whose innately idiotic black scalp tattoos can be seen glaringly under his corpse makeup—in the lead role as a flesh fucking street fiend who may be a zombie, but is more likely a schizophrenic bum (a technique that LaBruce also utilized in Otto) with a sinister sex drive, L.A. Zombie is easily the most aesthetically abhorrent, nihilistically nonsensical, and patently pretentious and preposterous zombie flick I have ever seen that makes one wonder whether or not LaBruce made the film as a perverse prank on zombiphiles and gay porn connoisseurs as a work that will surely leave both demographics (and everyone in between) feeling like the director defiled their soul in a feckless attempt to get back at all the people in high school who kicked his ass for being a limp-wristed fag. Released in two different versions—a 63-minute softcore version that was played at various film festivals and a 103-minute hardcore version that is not much more than a polished porn flick on steroids (and, indeed, many of the actors look they have taken their fair share of roids), L.A. Zombie is not only what is easily LaBruce's most uncreative and decidedly degenerate work to date, but a homo homogenization of everything that is sick and soulless in America, especially Los Angeles, as a film featuring racially mongrelized men who look like monsters without their makeup, psychopathic white collar criminals and gutter-dwelling mestizo gangbangers, and miscegenation-based muscle man on muscle man orgies, among various other decidedly deplorable things, which is no surprise considering it is set in modern Sodom, Los Angeles. In part inspired by auteur LaBruce's slave-morality-driven belief that zombies are treated too badly in films since the are killed by rabid rednecks for sport and whanot, as well as a response to the hysteria regarding gays and AIDS and other STDS, L.A. Zombie basically revolves around the gimmick that “instead of gay sex bringing death, it restores life,” thus making it what is easily the most recklessly and nonsensically ineffective gay propaganda flick ever made.

Slavic pseudo-frog fag wigger François Sagat plays is a lecherous yet ‘loving zombie’ who magically appears out of the Pacific ocean at the beginning of L.A. Zombie and makes his way around Los Angeles as a cadaverous cocksucker of sorts who will penetrate anything that is male and dead. Of course, as a crusty creature who nonsensically transforms from being blue and rotting yet muscle bound to a fairly ‘normal looking’ (normal in the flashy dressed Eastern European wigger sense) fellow with no discernible physical imperfections, it is dubious whether ‘The Zombie’ (he has no name) is actually an authentic reanimated corpse or not, though his foul fetish for muscular male flesh is unquestionable as a fiendish fleshwound addict who will fuck any mangled manful hole he can find. After being picked up by a swarthy twink (Rocco Giovanni) while hitchhiking, the Zombie is in a car accident that kills the driver of the car, so to pay back the young man back for his generosity, the post-post-mortem being buggers a wound in the boy’s chest with his grotesque elephant-trunk-like penis, thus reanimating his heart and giving him the gift of life as a new member of the wanton walking dead. After literally penetrating the heart of the car accident victim with his putrid prick, the Zombie also commits sodomy on the young man, ultimately ejaculating blood. After reaching downtown L.A., the Zombie digs through trash and hangs out at the Los Angeles River where he witnesses a white collar degenerate shooting and killing another white collar degenerate (Wolf Hudson), so he drags his corpse to a semen-soaked outdoor mattress and reanimates the young businessman by placing his member in the man’s fresh bullet wounds. In between creaming in the man-cunts on undead criminal corpses and taking messy coffee breaks at a café while all by his lonesome (no one seems to notice him, thus hinting that he is just a homo hobo and not a true blue zombie), the Zombie has equally banal and uneventful flashbacks about his life before becoming a member of the walking dead. After stealing some clothes, the Zombie finds the less than exquisite corpse of a gangster, so he fucks it via a bullet hole in the homeboy's head, thus demonstrating his salacious talent for skullfucking. Not long after, the Zombie also finds the corpse of a bum who overdosed on dope inside a makeshift cardboard box house, so he makes the hobo a flesh-fondling homo. Of course, the Zombie hits the jackpot when he enters a sodomite dungeon and witnesses a pack of neo-leather-fag types being killed in a multicultural coke deal gone bad, so he brings them back to life in a beyond bloody orgy and carnage-fueled circle jerk that echoes the carnage of Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985). In the end, the sentimental Zombie cries blood like a bitch while hanging out in a graveyard and reminiscing over his ex-boyfriends, even literally digging his own grave, but one suspects he inevitably keeps walking for some more masculine meat to manhandle. 

 A sort of pseudo-eccentric and excess-ridden yet radically aesthetically retarded piece of uniquely unpleasant celluloid ‘womb envy’ where undead sodomites create life via gay sex as opposed to spreading death and disease as one might assume, L.A. Zombie is undoubtedly impossible to swallow and even more impossible to enjoy as a work that brings new meaning to associating zombies with being braindead. Essentially Hustler White (1996) with zombies (including an unflattering cameo from Mr. Tony Ward as a bum), albeit minus the crude yet cultivated comedy and cinema/cultural references, L.A. Zombie is easily Bruce LaBruce’s most tediously tasteless and thoroughly thoughtless work, as if it was made as a gay recruiting video for zombie fans, except I doubt anyone—no matter how patently perverse and morbidly masochistic—would find it arousing, including the debauched director himself. Shrugging off the messy and plot-less structure of L.A. Zombie on his blog by stating, “Continuity is bourgeois,” LaBruce, not unlike the typical modern horror/zombie director, got lazy and thought by covering his film with blood, guts, and exaggerated genitals it would be adequate for not injecting it with the same sort of subversive and sardonic thought as his previous works like Hustler White (1996) and The Raspberry Reich (2004). A sick yet superlatively superficial fantasy where a schizophrenic bum converts the corpses of stereotypical LA criminal types like white collar crooks and Mexican gangsters with his clearly diseased and decaying poz-cock, L.A. Zombie seems like a sort of brazen yet boring ‘bug-chasing’ propaganda piece where a pseudo-zombie ‘giftgiver’ spreads the undead plague by fucking heterosexual male flesh. Not even writing a script but instead utilizing a mere 3-page outline, LaBruce directed mind numbingly banal digital zombie diarrhea that is as slow and seemingly retarded and uninteresting as the film’s flesheating anti-hero, hence why the character was played by a porn star. For screening LaBruce’s pseudo-celluloid atrocity at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), Australian filmmaker/ film festival director Richard Wolstencroft (Pearls Before Swine, The Beautiful and Damned), who in the past has caught flack for screening a documentary on historical revisionist David Irving, had the luxury of having his house raided by police, which I can respect, even if I cannot really respect L.A. Zombie; a “hardcore gay art porno” that actually manages to be boring in its intrinsic ugliness. L.A. Zombie is a grotesque yet greatly generic ‘gorno’ flick that, at best, should have been utilized as an extra feature for a DVD release of infinitely superior fag flesheater flick Otto; or Up with Dead People, and should be ultimately avoided like AIDS as a horrendous pseudo-zombie flick with a ‘positive’ poof message. 

-Ty E