Why We Loved ‘LA Zombie’

Fleshbot hosted the US Premiere of horror fuckfest "LA Zombie" last night in the East Village and (surprise!) we thought it was awesome. Here's why Bruce La Bruce's latest is more than just zombie porno.

Yeah, it's no secret that we've really been looking forward to finally seeing "LA Zombie," Bruce La Bruce's most recent feature film starring Francois Sagat as a horny (literally!) zombie/alien/creature/hobo with a thing for corpses. We've been waiting for this film to make its way to the US for well over a year now and the hype has been out of control. But what would you expect from a film that tackles necrophilia with the loving eye of an enthusiastic pornographer, that features shockingly explicit gore, and was banned in Australia?

So how did "LA Zombie" stack up against the headlines? It was certainly pornographic. The film unfolds much like your average feature length porn. The film opens with Zombie Sagat rising out of the ocean and stumbling onto the beaches of LA. We get no origin story—no irradiated sludge, alien spaceship, or horrible virus to explain the presence of the hideous creature. Sagat is less movie monster than homeless drifter. Coming from nowhere and heading in that very same direction, he wanders across the landscape of LA, finding violence and senseless death at every turn and then, you know, fucking the shit out of it.

Oh yeah, that's weird. Zombie Sagat has this penis-like…thing—a horrible monster appendage that makes the baby from "Eraserhead" look as wholesome and ordinary as apple pie. When he fucks the bodies of dead pornstars with it they reanimate and fuck him back. Over the course of the film, Sagat gives the Lazarus treatment to one very cute truck drive, a violently murdered Eddy Diaz, a guy with a bullet hole in his head (this, apparently, is real skullfucking), and a group of raunchy gay coke addicts at the film's climax featuring Erik Rhodes, Adam Killian, Francisco D'Macho and Matthew Rush. All the while, Zombie Sagat morphs in and out of make-up and levels of monstrosity, leaving the viewer unsure if he's been watching a monster movie, or one schizophrenic homeless man's horrifying delusions.

"LA Zombie" strikes that perfect balance between raunchy fun and disorienting, art-school horror, and its low-budget DIY aesthetic adds a more than a little camp to the proceedings. "Project Runway's" Santino Rice makes a cameo as a sassy homeless person with an unsurprisingly chic outfit and the aforementioned skull-fucking drew both laughs and gasps from the crowd. This here is the secret to the film's success: it's never any one thing.