Product Details

• Actors: Jey Crisfar, Katharina Klewinghaus, Guido Sommer, Susanne Sachse, Marcel Schlutt
• Directors: Bruce LaBruce
• Format: Black & White, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Strand Releasing
• DVD Release Date: February 10, 2009
• Run Time: 94 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001L1CNFC
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #121,770 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Otto; Or, Up With Dead People" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Bruce LaBruce’s feature Otto; Or, Up With Dead People will either thrill or repulse, as it is tailored to the rather specific sexual tastes that this art film director has spent his career elucidating. Otto does, however, vary from pornographic past LaBruce fetish films such as The Raspberry Reich and Skin Gang in that Otto will appeal to camp horror experts and those interested in conceptual links between abjection, fashion, and desire. As LaBruce fans may suspect, Otto; Or, Up With Dead People has a far-fetched plot that exists seemingly to provide framework for his visual explorations of homosexual identity. In it, a young, sexy zombie, Otto (Jey Crisfar), wanders Berlin streets until filmmaker Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus), whose name is Maya Deren with a twist, casts Otto in her upcoming zombie flick. Paired with actor Fritz Fritze (Marcel Schlutt), the viewer wonders throughout if Otto is a true zombie or another actor amongst the several he is filmed with. In this, there is the constant meta-film, an external narrative that asks the viewer to assess one’s own willingness to believe in monsters. With the help of her brother/DP, Adolf (Guido Sommer), and her girlfriend, Hella Bent (Susanne Sachse), who appears only in vintage looking, black and white footage as if she’s a ghost transmitting from the past, Medea directs Otto in various insalubrious settings, such as the Berlin dump. The effect is humorous and extremely odd. Not until Otto dials up ex-boyfriend, Rudolf, to meet on a park bench does one begin to understand the roots of Otto’s past, which has led to existential crisis.

Structurally, the film is quite scenic and abstract, and its cool soundtrack, which includes CocoRosie and Antony and the Johnsons, reinforces the music video, Kenneth Anger aspect of this stylistic movie. Several times throughout, in fact, are mock mentions of the high fashion industry’s vampiric way of thieving style away from those who wear clothes as sincere expression. Zombie fashion, in Otto’s world, is totally in. While the plot falls in an out of focus, scenes lend a picturesque, dream-like setting to several recognizable Berlin hotspots, such as the abandoned amusement park, Spreewald, and the Badeschiff along the Spree River. This is to say that as much as Otto; Or, Up With Dead People is a horror film, it also captures and meditates on trends in current fashion and art communities. As mentioned before, there is less sex in this feature than in LaBruce’s previous, yet a warning should be issued that the erotic scenes in Otto are straight-up gruesome, porno-updates of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast and other gore fests. --Trinie Dalton

Product Description

Studio: Strand Releasing Release Date: 02/10/2009 Run time: 94 minutes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a typical zombie movie, February 9, 2009

By 

L. Miller (BC Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Otto; Or, Up With Dead People (DVD)

When I saw that there was a "gay zombie movie" being shown at my local film festival, it sounded hilarious and I knew I wanted to see it. Zombie movies have always scared and intrigued me , and are usually silly and campy to boot. However, this movie delivered much more than mindless thrills and gore. It's hard to go into too much detail about why this movie is so incredible without spoiling the ending, but this movie has heartwrenching commentary on homophobia, mental illness, societal alienation and much more. Many issues are brought to the surface and there will be at least one that will strike a chord with viewers. Not to say this movie didn't have screamingly funny or gory moments - it delivered in that department, too. Something for everyone!

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bruce LaBruce Triumphs Again!, February 7, 2009

By 

Patrick "DVD Fanatic" (WA state - USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Otto; Or, Up With Dead People (DVD)

This film is easily my favorite Bruce LaBruce work to date. Everything about it is more than I had expected and left me totally satisfied with my new LaBruce fix. A unique storyline and soundtrack - superb timeless costuming - beautiful locations around the city of Berlin - it all came together for a sometimes humorous and very touching gay Zombie story and their gay Zombie sexcapades. The bonus stuff include the Director's insightful commentary - deleted Zombie sex scenes (equal to those in his feature "Skin Gang") - alternative campaigns and the original theatrical trailer. What more could I want? Bruce has brought together a group of talented Bohemians to create this work of art as only Europeans can provide. Needless to say I love it. Six Gold Stars.

5.0 out of 5 stars An original mixture of horror sub-genre and gay characters, October 30, 2011

By 

Arcadio Bolaños (Lima, Peru) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Otto; Or, Up With Dead People (DVD)

Bruce La Bruce film is a brilliant analysis of contemporary displaced people, individuals who live on the margins of society, groups that struggle to obtain validation of either legal or social nature.

"Otto" is the story of an outcast teenager. Now, there would be nothing original about this except for one detail: In a world in which the living dead are humanity's recurrent plague, Otto is a boy that defines himself as a non flesh-eating zombie with an identity crisis.

From the very beginning, the viewer is aware of a narration inside a narration, in a way that would be comparable to Propst literary models. "Up with Dead People" is the movie that lesbian intellectual Medea is filming, with references to Hélène Cixous views on the essential bisexuality of L'ecriture femenine, as well as Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman (the mirroring of the female body surmounts feminist theory in this film as Hella, Medea's girlfriend, can only appear on screen as a black and white image from old reels of 1910-1920 movies, thus enabling a parallel between these two women and even classic and contemporary cinema).

In the first scene Otto rises from the grave, a classic image that has transcended the 7th art and has forever become part of popular culture. Ever since Romero's Night of the Living Dead (30th Anniversary Limited Edition) (1968) filmmakers have toyed with one of humanity's most fierily rooted fears: death or rather the question "what happens after Death?". Romero and others have also explored the living dead as a metaphor of social marginality and the reification of the subaltern thus creating one of the most fascinating sub-genres in film's history.

This film proudly assumes this cultural heritage and builds upon it. As the narrator's voice tell us in the first scenes, these dead people have little or nothing to do with the classic flesh-eating, brain-devouring zombie. Those who are alive judge them as "An echo of their own somnambulistic conformist behavior". Normal society is exposed as a tyrannical Lacanian "Great Other", a Great Other that demands adaptation or extinction. Insofar heterosexual normative is carried out the Great Other is satisfied. The symbolic order, that which constitutes what one would perceive as "reality", can never suppress the "real" (id est, the obstacle of the symbolic order). But the real can only exist after the symbolic order (which relies greatly on language, the widest symbolization process known) has been fully inserted in everyone's mind. Then, it's only logical that zombies are finally able to reclaim language and reasoning. If zombies were the outsiders of past decades, they are now entities that can never fit in and that are constantly aware of their own situation. What can be more destabilizing for the heterosexual normative than homosexuality taken to the extreme?, in this case, a new wave of gay zombies that prey upon male flesh, in a very carnal and literal way.

Otto lives, or unlives, eating animals instead of humans. He runs away from those who would seek to harm him. And he finds a way to define himself thanks to Medea and her movie which is full of theory references. As Medea's brother so aptly confirms, here the subject is "the empty signifier upon which you could project any particular gender".

Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory derives from Levi-Strauss structuralism in Structural Anthropology (after Saussure and Jacobson linguistic studies). They would affirm that certain structures have invariably persisted in humanity's development. One of such structures is the dual nature of language. When Saussure defined langue and parole he decided that the entire language was nothing more than a system of signs, signs that had arbitrary value and that would only have meaning in their relation with other signs. If so, the human language can only exist in a dual system of opposition (signifier / signified: signifier as the acoustic image generated by an idea or object and signified as the word in any given language that is utilized to retrieve that acoustic image from our memory). This fundamental duality has its first manifestation in sexual gender (males versus females). And as Lacan explains, the first structure one encounters as one enters into the world is that of sex, one is either a man or a woman, no one can be both or neither. Or at least that's what heterosexual normative would have us believe. There is no place for a third sex and has never been one, hermaphrodites and other variants have been utterly discarded by psychoanalytic theory.

Lacan, nonetheless, accepts in his sexuation graphic that being a woman doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the female position or that being a man doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the male position. He also accepts that the male and female positions have evolved through history and adapted to social requirements, being a man or being a woman, as gender affiliated roles, is a sign of arbitrariness, in the sense that there is nothing human that can be defined as a masculine or feminine behavior. Everything is a social construction. And as such is an empty signifier. Gender roles are different now compared to recent centuries, or even decades, and they keep changing. Nothing is set in stone.

Does "Otto" attempt to disrupt the Lacanian structure? Otto has experienced idealized love (indisputably visible in his flashbacks as a living boy), savage and destructive sex with a costumed gay that thinks Otto is disguised as a zombie, and the possibility of a more complete relationship with Fritz, the movie star. He deals with the masculine position in his first love, he assumes sex as the ultimate manifestation of a consumer-based capitalist world (to consume and cannibalize are here synonyms), and finally accepts the failure to insert himself into society (after his brief relationship with Fritz) and wanders towards the north, hoping to find people like him, hoping to find, perhaps, a Utopian gay civilization in which the living and non-living can finally divert their basic and seemingly irreconcilable natures.