It takes a certain caliber of film-maker to approach a genre which was intended to horrify its audience and, instead, make it amuse and move them.
I found "Otto; or, Up With Dead People" to be Bruce LaBruce's strongest work to date. The plot was both the most linear and accessible, and at the same time the most convoluted. Even with a lack of chronology, a dizzying metafilm of movie within movie, and multiple points of view and filming techniques, the movie manages to devote more time to standard plot development than previous Bruce LaBruce works.
Perhaps this was necessary to reach out to all the viewers on a more explicit level, and create empathy for a character, who belongs to a group of otherwise reviled monsters. It was quite bizarre to leave the theater relating to characters who had been shown brutally eviscerating each other in graphic detail.
But it is this feeling of commonality with a supposedly terrifying monster that makes the movie powerful and touching. The equivocal metaphor that compares conformist society to zombies is more like a thinly veiled reality: take away the blood and guts and what's the difference between the two?
It goes to show that you don't always need a grandiose and earnest tone to say something significant. Sometimes, the silliest and most ridiculous metaphors are the ones which uncover the most meaningful truth.
I found "Otto; or, Up With Dead People" to be Bruce LaBruce's strongest work to date. The plot was both the most linear and accessible, and at the same time the most convoluted. Even with a lack of chronology, a dizzying metafilm of movie within movie, and multiple points of view and filming techniques, the movie manages to devote more time to standard plot development than previous Bruce LaBruce works.
Perhaps this was necessary to reach out to all the viewers on a more explicit level, and create empathy for a character, who belongs to a group of otherwise reviled monsters. It was quite bizarre to leave the theater relating to characters who had been shown brutally eviscerating each other in graphic detail.
But it is this feeling of commonality with a supposedly terrifying monster that makes the movie powerful and touching. The equivocal metaphor that compares conformist society to zombies is more like a thinly veiled reality: take away the blood and guts and what's the difference between the two?
It goes to show that you don't always need a grandiose and earnest tone to say something significant. Sometimes, the silliest and most ridiculous metaphors are the ones which uncover the most meaningful truth.