Shock! Horror! Yawn... After all the excitement and angst, the attempts to ban it by those antiquated prudes at The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards, we finally got to see controversial Canadian film-maker Bruce LaBruce’s latest (2010) film, L.A. Zombie. As a friend remarked, the font he used in the opening was good and it went downhill from there. I was laughing through the first five minutes or so, then I just got more and more bored with it all. LaBruce is used to being controversial. He goes for in-your-face sexual content, often brutal, and touching on taboo themes like Nazism as part of the sexual kick he likes playing with. He pushes boundaries, and I’m all for that. I loved his 1999 film Skinflick and have vague memories of enjoying Hustler White (1996) as well. But they were edgy, sexy and made me think a little. This didn’t. Briefly, Francois Sagat, the porn star, appears out of the sea as a zombie. He then gets mysteriously picked-up by a hot guy in a truck. Now I would usually pick up Sagat any day, but covered in bad blue body makeup with werewolf teeth? Maybe not. The truck crashes, the driver is dead, with large bloody wounds, and Sagat literally fucks him back to life by graphically fucking the wounds with his super-sized cock and shooting red cum all over him until the driver’s heart ,which is hanging outside his body, starts pumping again. Repeat with various others around LA. One of the corpses he fucks back to life is a vagrant living in a cardboard box, which has mysterious Tardis like qualities – way bigger on the inside than the outside; I liked that. All the corpses were hot – porn stars I’m guessing. The ability to act was obviously not a requirement when casting them. There were all sorts of themes and metaphors that could be read into it if you tried. Gay men, arse-fucking, blood, death, contagion, rescue. Is the zombie bringing gay men back to life because he loves them? Is this a metaphor for how we look after each other? Are gay men dead inside unless someone loves our wounds? Is it about HIV? Sagat fucks bareback all the time – is this saying something about the power of cum? But I’m really not sure if any of these were in the director’s head when he made it. It seemed more like a haphazard montage of a bad zombie and a bad gay porn flick than anything else. I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t turned on and apart from the first few minutes, I wasn’t amused – I was bored. I’m glad that we had the chance to see it, glad that the SPCS didn’t win their fight, but I honestly can’t recommend it. Go to his earlier works to see what he’s like when he’s good – then he’s great – this one – nah. Michael Stevens - 8th June 2011