Let’s get this out of the way first: when I say Otto, I am referring to Otto, or Up With Dead People because I am not writing Otto, or Up With Dead People every time I want to make reference to the movie. Otto is a strange pick for Halloween but I won’t pretend to be surprised by what I got because I had read plenty about it well before I even got to the TLA. Philadelphia is proud host a large GLBT community and so this film is a nice little addition to 31 Nights of Terror featuring gay zombies… sort of.
I have to admit that the very idea of the entire story got my attention because I have some kind of strange sixth sense when movies that go completely batty in terms of subject matter appear on the scene. Otto gets your attention with the combined words gay zombie which certainly looks like a way of getting attention but if Bruce LaBruce’s filmography is anything to go by, it certainly comes across that the man just likes homosexuality… and zombies.
Nevertheless when I rented this film I was warned that not a lot of people had come back likeing it and even I was not waiting for it to be the next winner at the Berlin Film Festival but for the most part, Otto is a good little experimental German film that gets the most important element right: it knows what it is. Otto never gets out of line, overly artsy, preachy or shoving points in your face. In fact, I am not sure if I should take the points it does dish out seriously or not, so well laced with ironic and facetious overtones were they delivered.
The acting is what hold Otto together because all of the characters play their parts well and though for the zombies there isn’t much to say, the living cast was deliciously over the top in a neo-gothic German sort that just brushed me the right way.
The one amazing thing I cannot get over in Otto is the color: I can only assume that this was shot on HD and that is why everything looks so wonderfully beautiful, even for a low budget zombie flick. What makes the color so remarkable is that in a day and age where anything related to horror and/or drama seems to have a brownish/grey-black shade permanently glued to the camera lens, it becomes a rare thing indeed to see such lifelike colors and I thoroughly enjoyed being treated to Berlin and the German countryside in all of its splendor. In the end, Bruce LaBruce might be onto something in that respect because at the end of the day it’s true that blood is, well, red and with high definition it is only redder still, something that is almost by default a good thing in a horror film.
Nevertheless, the film felt overly amateur by the never ending abuse of camera options. I can’t stress enough that in most cases, less is more: certainly this rule might have a few exceptions in what I call the Return of the Jedi phenomenon, but for the most part if you can be simple and subtle, the chances are you should be. Otto should have followed in this suit but instead uses fade outs, filters, black and white shots, split screens and so on down the list, every option you will find on an advanced camera has been used in this movie and it doesn’t seem aesthetic at all, rather more like Bruce LaBruce had just bought the thing and was trying out all of the different things it could do.
The camera abuses were often coupled with a less than stellar soundtrack which one might try to sell off as ‘underground’ but I have heard enough ‘underground’ to know that it doesn’t so very much like that. This music was ‘experimental’ if I want to be nice and, if I don’t want to be nice’ sounds like wires clanking together inside a SEPTA bus being repaired in a tunnel: it’s just noise.
The story was also told in a very cut up manner- the editing is horrible in terms of what-goes-where and the last few end scenes which are supposed to clear up the mess do their job but left me feeling unsatisfied which I suppose could be called anticlimactic though I am not sure I would say this is the kind of film with a climax anyway.
Otto is a film which continues in the great tradition of making German cinema the most bizarre, and to some extent because of that the most interesting, I have ever seen. Ultimately I enjoyed Otto: its quirky, tongue in cheek and just plain fun in that way. That said, if you prefer your zombie movies to be entirely senseless to the nth degree with nothing but irrelevant teenage subplots, go see Zombieland.
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