Australia is agog over a recent raid on the Melbourne home of a film festival director over the screening of a controversial zombie porn film in September.
Richard Wolstencroft, a noted film-maker and head of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), said Thursday's search was fruitless for police because his copy of "LA Zombie" had been destroyed.
The film, by Canadian director Bruce LaBruce, was banned by the Australian Classification Board just before it was set to air at the Melbourne International Film Festival in July.
Canadian director Bruce LaBruce's "LA Zombie," featuring necrophile aliens, homosexual sex and full-frontal male nudity, was pulled from the Melbourne International Film Festival in July after objections from censors.
The hour-long, wordless film, starring French porn star Francois Sagat, depics a schizophrenic homeless man who is convinced he is an alien zombie sent to roam the streets of Los Angeles in search of dead bodies and gay sex.
A zombie is a creature that appears in books, films and popular culture. It is typically a reanimated corpse, or a human being who is being controlled by someone else by use of magic. More recent stories have used a pandemic illness to explain them. Stories of zombies originated in the West African spiritual belief system of voodoo, which told of the people being controlled as laborers by a powerful wizard. Zombies became a popular device in modern horror fiction, largely because of the success of George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.
It's a shame that a worthwhile cause is going to be poisoned by its association with a hypocritical neo-fascist.