Guest Blog: The Weirding Dead – Author Jamie Russell’s Top 10 Strangest Zombie Movies
Debi Moore
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Otto; Or Up With Dead People (2008)
The production company behind this high-minded German-Canadian zombie porno-philosophy flick is called Existential Crisis Productions, which tells you all you need to know about its pretentiousness. Canadian director Bruce LaBruce, who describes himself as a “reluctant pornographer,” delivers a politicised queer zombie movie that alternates between Marxist swipes at capitalist culture and sex orgies where a zombie penetrates a stomach wound with his manhood. It’s ambitious and weird; sometimes startling, often boring and largely a mess… but its hoodie-wearing, emo-kid protagonist Otto (Jey Crisfar), dubbed “the gay Che Guevara of the undead,” has a poignant sadness about him that’s hard to forget. If Jean-Luc Godard made a queer zombie movie, it might look a bit like this. La Bruce returned to living dead cinema with the more extreme L.A. Zombie Hardcore in 2010, which featured French porn stud François Sagat wandering through Los Angeles sporting blue alien-zombie makeup and a raging hard-on.
Flick (2007)
Little known Flick deserves a lot more love. Shot in Wales, it opens in the ‘50s where a stuttering teddy boy (Hugh O’Conor) is hounded by a bunch of bullies and drives his car off the road into a watery grave. Years later, when his now-vintage car is dragged from the depths, the pissed off Elvis fan stumbles back to life wearing an algae-covered slim coat and brothel creepers. Hungry for revenge, he tracks down the now middle-aged rockers who wronged him, slicing them up with his flick knife. On the trail is local detective Sergeant Miller (Mark Benton, from British TV’s “Waterloo Road”), who’s partnered with Lt. McKenzie, a one-armed cop on exchange from Memphis, Tennessee, played by Faye Dunaway. Yes, Faye Dunaway… Back projection, CG and an array of Dutch camera angles help make Flick look like a no-budget, Wales-set zombie version of Sin City.
