LA Zombie, a Canadian zombie movie starring a French porn star, was the subject of police-mandated destruction in Australia.
In today’s news of zombie-movie persecution: Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, entered his film LA Zombie into the Melbourne International Film Festival, hoping to share his graphic, sexualized zombie vision with the people of Australia. According to The New York Times, LA Zombie “stars a French porn star as a schizophrenic homeless man who believes he is a cannibalistic ghoul,” and depicts homosexual sex, full-frontal male nudity, and necrophilia. (Having not seen the film, I can’t speak to the veracity of that statement, but a Google image search yields some pretty graphic results.) The film was unfortunately rejected by Australia’s Classification Board (the country’s film reviewing body, run by the government), who deemed it unclassifiable; LA Zombie summarily pulled from the festival. Festival director Richard Wolstencroft took a stand against the decision, saying he believed the film “artistically significant,” and held an underground screening of the film in July.
The Australian police must have been miffed by not having been invited to this summer’s screening. This past week (a full four months later), the police raided Wolstencraft’s home in hopes of perhaps destroying the festival director’s copy, only to be thwarted by the fact that he had beat them to the punch. He did not specify why he’d destroyed it, after defending it so thoroughly; possible motives include amazingly having predicted this bizarre series of events, being paranoid, and taking a stand against the fact that this film is apparently so inflammatory that the man destroyed it before the police could get their hands on it.
Bruce LaBruce made a movie about a homeless, schizophrenic, necrophiliac, homosexual zombie starring a French porn star that someone destroyed before the Australian police could get it. You cannot make this stuff up.
Source: The New York Times ArtsBlog (image)
