Screen Machine

Review: L.A. Zombie

Walking through the little streets of Melbourne – trying impossibly to find the location of a poorly signed club from a hastily scrawled map – while ever wondering if the night’s film will even make it to the screen, one cannot help but be reminded – in the heat of this excitement – of that astute observation once made by Georges Bataille: that “the successful transgression…maintains the prohibition in order to benefit by it”.

Just weeks earlier… Eureka! exclaimed director LaBruce upon hearing that the Melbourne International Film Festival had just banned his latest work, L.A. Zombie – a film chronicling the necrosexual escapades of the alien-dead François Sagat (of TitanMen fame). While at first, obviously, almost superficially, we may understand his excitement in regards to the boost in ticket sales that such infamy inevitable generates, is there not a more significant detail missed in our propensity to understand Bad Cinema as merely a political economy?

To shock, to transgress, relies foremost on the ability to sacralise, to separate – to declare a beyond (of taste, decency, morality, etc.) that is ultimately reinforced through the violation of the taboo itself. The power of transgression is thus not to break with Law but to render it visible. Indeed, conversely, as Bataille argues, “if we observe the taboo, if we submit to it, we are no longer conscious of it”.

L.A. Zombie, formally speaking, is not a shocking film. In its modular makeup, its flat repetition, it is obedient to the generic requirements of pornography. Curiously however we fail to judge it as such.

‘Where’s the plot?’ – ‘It could have really ended after the first wound-sagging’ – ‘ That was boring’ – ‘What a shit film’.

Indeed, unlike his previous foray into the pornographic, The Raspberry Reich (2004), there is no structural transgression here – no bending of its hardcore rules (such as the inclusion of a militant sexual politics). As such, content becomes the only criteria for our assessment. Yet is fictionalised gore really that confronting to a generation raised on Two Girls, One Cup, Goatsie and Tubgirl (not to mention the wonders of the Japanese!)?

Yes, the content predictably escalates over the film’s course – there is ropeplay, watersports and a gruesome orgy to finish it off. Sagat’s penis (as one audience member remarked) does indeed look like a dog’s cock. It pisses out blood (blue-black at one point) at a strangely perpendicular angle in place of regular ejaculate. Yet none of this is ever really framed to horrify (unlike the far more terrifying film Antichrist, 2009), let alone arouse its audience.

Still, the experience in itself was most definitely worth it – with MUFF legends and Co. concluding the screening with an ecstatic “We did it!”, ushering an uncertain audience towards massive applause. Yet I still can’t help but feel that the erotics of this evening out at a makeshift porno theatre lay in the situation itself. For that alone the tenacity of Australian Censorship Board cannot be thanked enough.

Peter is currently completing his honours year in film and television at Monash University, writing his thesis on the history of zombie films and their interpretation.

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