Film round-up
Zombies just won't die. They've gone viral, it seems, appearing in rewritten Jane Austen novels and cluttering up HMV's horror section with titles like Zombeak. This belongs to the category of films which I can't even bother to pick up off the rack, to find out what it's about - never mind actually watching the thing. I imagine that it's about undead budgerigars.
By rights everyone should be bored with zombies by now, but obviously they have a way of transcending boredom, perhaps by becoming a kind of metaphor for it. Zombies And Their Metaphors... someone should write that book. Perhaps the key to the rise of the zombies is that you can pretty much do anything with them. Take Bruce Labruce's LA Zombie, in which gay porn star Francois Sagat plays an 'alien zombie' who walks out of the ocean and shuffles round LA reanimating corpses with his enormous undead penis that gushes black stuff. Yes, zombie porn is here. Although, in it's shorter version at least, there is a certain innocence about LA Zombie which reminds me of Charlie Chaplin films... or perhaps it's just me.
I saw this at a festival, where the producer, introducing the film, said he had three spare copies on DVD which he'd flog for a tenner afterwards if anybody was interested. It all sounded wonderfully seedy, but unfortunately I had to run for my train.
Mark Pirro's Rectuma (seen recently on DVD) is in a way the opposite of LA Zombie, with its redemptive cock. Interesting to imagine this film being pitched to Hollywood execs: 'Well, it's about this guy who gets raped by a Mexican frog and then a Japanese scientist puts a radioactive rod up his arse, and the arse then detaches itself from his body, grows to gigantic proportions, and lays waste to LA...' Get Tom Cruise on the line right now!
For arse read butt, because obviously this is an American film, and I'm not entirely certain that the humour really translates. However, it's interesting to wonder what Freud would have made of this. He might have felt that a giant penis would have worked better as a wild destructive force, so it is at least pleasingly counter-intuitive to find instead a death-dealing bottom. Counter-intuitive is the word: you spend most of this film in a state of vague surprise at the fact that it actually got funding. Actually - not that much funding.
A couple of Japanese singers provide a kind of - erm - Greek chorus. They are unceremoniously crushed at the end of the credits by the star of the proposed sequel, Scroton. It doesn't seem likely that this sequel will ever be made - on the other hand, it may be that radioactive ballbags are the new zombie. Watch this cultural space.
By rights everyone should be bored with zombies by now, but obviously they have a way of transcending boredom, perhaps by becoming a kind of metaphor for it. Zombies And Their Metaphors... someone should write that book. Perhaps the key to the rise of the zombies is that you can pretty much do anything with them. Take Bruce Labruce's LA Zombie, in which gay porn star Francois Sagat plays an 'alien zombie' who walks out of the ocean and shuffles round LA reanimating corpses with his enormous undead penis that gushes black stuff. Yes, zombie porn is here. Although, in it's shorter version at least, there is a certain innocence about LA Zombie which reminds me of Charlie Chaplin films... or perhaps it's just me.
I saw this at a festival, where the producer, introducing the film, said he had three spare copies on DVD which he'd flog for a tenner afterwards if anybody was interested. It all sounded wonderfully seedy, but unfortunately I had to run for my train.
Mark Pirro's Rectuma (seen recently on DVD) is in a way the opposite of LA Zombie, with its redemptive cock. Interesting to imagine this film being pitched to Hollywood execs: 'Well, it's about this guy who gets raped by a Mexican frog and then a Japanese scientist puts a radioactive rod up his arse, and the arse then detaches itself from his body, grows to gigantic proportions, and lays waste to LA...' Get Tom Cruise on the line right now!
For arse read butt, because obviously this is an American film, and I'm not entirely certain that the humour really translates. However, it's interesting to wonder what Freud would have made of this. He might have felt that a giant penis would have worked better as a wild destructive force, so it is at least pleasingly counter-intuitive to find instead a death-dealing bottom. Counter-intuitive is the word: you spend most of this film in a state of vague surprise at the fact that it actually got funding. Actually - not that much funding.
A couple of Japanese singers provide a kind of - erm - Greek chorus. They are unceremoniously crushed at the end of the credits by the star of the proposed sequel, Scroton. It doesn't seem likely that this sequel will ever be made - on the other hand, it may be that radioactive ballbags are the new zombie. Watch this cultural space.
posted by martin at 10:50 AM
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