GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

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September 23, 2011 www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com

Bruce LaBruce's latest transgression: Reanimation sex

by Anthony Glassman

Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce has been called many things, from the enfant terrible of queer cinema to a pornographer.

Really, at the heart of it, they're all true. He will commit seemingly anything to film, and the most frightening part is the fact that it actually means, something, the mirror it holds up to society is, in some way, valid.

He started in the punk rock 'zine world, putting out his own little queer rock and roll magazine, before segueing into filmmaking and rising to greater prominence with the seminal No Skin Off My Ass, in which he starred as a young man in love with an ostensibly heterosexual skinhead.

Since then, he has put out a handful of movies, each more transgressive than the last. Hustler White had stump sex, while Raspberry Reich exemplified the idea of gay sex as a revolutionary action. He has folded pornography in with diegetic filmmaking in a way that no other filmmaker truly has, and Jon Cameron Mitchell's Short Bus owes at least one of its wheels to LaBruce.

Now, he's back with another assault on bourgeois sensibilities in the form of L.A. Zombie, starring porn sensation (and probably one of the hottest men in the world) Francois Sagat as the eponymous not-quitenormal lead.

Another director might play coy about the film---what do you mean, it seems like Sagat might just be a wee bit nuts? LaBruce, however, is never coy.

"The Sagat character, the alien zombie, can be interpreted as a homeless, schizophrenic person who has the delusion or hallucination that he's a zombie. Therefore, I changed the color and style of the make-up throughout to reinforce this split identification," he noted. "Sometimes he is only half made up, or the parts of the body that are painted shift."

"His split identity becomes magnified as the movie progresses, which is when his most grotesque identity emerges, signifying the extreme nature of his mental disturbance," LaBruce continued.

By the way, the main character can apparently raise the dead by fornicating with their wounds. He does it a few times throughout the film, first with the young man who picks him up hitchhiking but flies through the windshield when his SUV crashes, then later with an assortment of other hunks.

Despite the mechanism involved in raising the dead, Sagat's world-famous penis is seen only briefly.

"Actually, there is a hardcore version of the film called L.A. Zombie Hardcore that features. Francois Sagat's own penis quite prominently," LaBruce stated. "L.A. Zombie is a different experience because in the theatrical version you only see his fake, alien penis."

Francois Sagat prepares to "heal" a dead accident victim.

"I was intrigued by the idea of making a kind of 'fake porn' with a prosthetic penis," he explained. "It makes the viewer selfconscious of the act of watching porn and

consider the way it is conventionally depicted and consumed. The porn I make always uses distanciation devices to make the viewer aware of the mechanics of watching porn."

Continued on facing page

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