Australian police raid film festival director’s house over L.A. Zombie Zombies are welcome to kill Down Under, so
long as they don’t do anything to those of the same sex down under. This seems to be the message after law enforcement raided the home of an Australian film festival director in November, hunting for a copy of L.A. Zombie, the latest feature from Bruce LaBruce, the Canadian director known for his art house gay pornography, and, more recently, the 2008 queer zombie movie Otto; or Up with Dead Peo- ple (RM#88). Seeing as L.A. Zombie features gay porn star
François Sagat as an alien zombie that goes around bringing the dead back to life by graph- ically getting it on with their corpses, a certain amount of controversy was to be expected. Yet Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) di- rector Richard Wolstencroft never expected it would lead to a visit from the constabulary, es- pecially since he had screened the film without incident for MUFF back in August. “We thought if L.A. Zombie was such a prob-
lem they would have been at the screening to stop it, or at least called or emailed to warn us,” says Wolstencroft. “I did not expect to have my house raided two months after the event.” Wolstencroft has made a career of tweaking
the noses of Australian censors, including host- ing a showing of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom at MUFF in 2001 after it was banned. But when Victoria police showed up at 8:30 a.m. on November 11, 2010 to search his home for a copy of L.A. Zombie, he was flummoxed. He’d destroyed his copy of the film after the August screening. “The fact that a festival director has to take
these precautions in a free and democratic country like Australia is sad and absurd,” he says. Since the raid, Wolstencroft has garnered sup-
port from a variety of filmmakers, film festival directors and social activists, including Aus- tralian director Christina Andreef (Soft Fruit), Toronto International Film Festival director Noah Cowan and noted American feminist Camille Paglia. Underground-cinema journalist Jack Sargeant (Deathtripping: The Cinema of Trans-
RM8 D R E A D L I N E S L.A. Zombie: François Sagat stars in Bruce LaBruce’s gay zombie porn flick.
gression) sent MUFF a letter of support signed by 33 film fans, directors and festival heads, stating that, “Beneath the stage-bloodied zom- bie movie is a tender film about the regenerative powers of sex and love.” This gets at something that LaBruce himself
thinks has been lost in all of the controversy. Though L.A. Zombie is heavy on gay sex and gore (there’s a hardcore version in the works), it’s also a celebration of a place the director con- siders his “spiritual homeland.” “I particularly like [the city’s] seedy underbelly,
and the idea that a lot of people go there to seek fame and fortune and end up having to deal with the harsh reality of this huge, almost apocalyptic metropolis,” LaBruce says. “It can be a very dark place, but it’s also very beautiful somehow in its corruption. L.A. Zombie is about an alien zombie who finds dead people in the city and fucks them back to life. I thought it was the perfect allegory for the Hollywood experience.”
Australian censors have been wrestling with
that allegory as far back as July of last year when the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) was forced to boot L.A. Zombie from its schedule after the Australian Classification Board refused it a rating. (Movies such as George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead, in which zombies graphically kill their victims, are freely available in the country.) Wolstencroft is still waiting to see what, if
anything, he will be charged with, while LaBruce is grateful for the support. “Censorship always brings much more atten-
tion to a movie than it would have normally re- ceived on its own,” the director says. “I can only extend my heartfelt thanks.” L.A. Zombie has made the film festival rounds
from Locarno to the Toronto International Film Festival, LaBruce observes. “Not bad for a hard- core gay zombie gore porn movie!” A.S. BERMAN
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