BRUCE LABRUCE

Sex sells—the saying goes—even if the actor (French-Arab porn star Francois Sagat) is an alien zombie who roams the streets of Los Angeles having sex with dead bodies while bringing them back to life. And sex sells two fold when the writer-director is the legendary Bruce LaBruce, whose upcoming film, LA Zombie, is set to release in February 2010.

Man-on-man action is only a piece of his work rather than the whole. LaBruce is known to touch on the themes of misfit, race, class, neo-Nazism, and prejudice in many of his films; it’s part of a voice and statement to the world.

“I’m an artist who works in porn rather than as a porn director. Filmmaking is the priority; porn is the vehicle for the genre,” says LaBruce.

In the film Otto; Or, Up With the Dead People, the main character, Otto, is a lonely, lost, young zombie cast on the foreign streets of Berlin. When Otto is picked up by a filmmaker for a role in a porno-zombie film he discovers his past and tries to reunite with his ex-lover. Other than the minor sex scenes, the film brings to life a boy who once had a normal life but now feels rejected by society.

“It struck me that it was so similar to how I felt as a teenager,” says LaBruce.

The Southampton, Ontario-born filmmaker has directed and written more than a dozen films, acting in at least half of them. He received a master’s degree in film and social and political thought under the direction of his professor Robin Wood, a Marxist-feminist film critic. Although much of his work is influenced by academia it is also very personal and taken from the times.

In the ‘80s, LaBruce was heavily involved with the punk movement. He didn’t find the group to be very radical nor accepting of his sexuality, but it was an underground movement that appealed to his anti-corporation and anti-mainstream beliefs. It was also one of the main oppositional forces against the Reagan administration, and a powerful force combined with gay sex. Separately he had developed a minor fixation for skinheads.

During this time, LaBruce developed a relationship with a male prostitute who turned into an abusive neo-Nazi skinhead after they broke up. LaBruce tried to ridicule him out of his fashion and received a beating instead. He never saw him again.

“He hit me and it felt like a kiss,” says LaBruce.

After the incident LaBruce wrote, directed, and acted in No Skin Off My Ass. One of his earlier works, the film is about a gay hair stylist (LaBruce) who develops an obsession for a skinhead and, in the end, convinces him to go punk. Shown at many festivals around the world, the film attracted a cult following.

Whether it’s porn, politics, or zombies, there is no doubt that LaBruce is an icon in the independent film and porn industry.

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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.