Otto; or, Up with Dead People

Otto; or, Up with Dead People

Is it possible to come back from the dead?

2008 · 94 min · ★ 5.3 · Drama, Horror, Comedy

A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is still trying to finish Up with Dead People, the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that he has a wallet that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember details about his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.

Directed by Bruce LaBruce · Written by Bruce LaBruce

Your Rating

Where to Watch

Streaming

Rent or Buy

Cast

Jey Crisfar Otto
Katharina Klewinghaus Medea Yarn / Lascivious Ballet Dancer #1
Susanne Sachße Hella Bent / Lascivious Ballet Dancer #2
Marcel Schlutt Fritz Fritze
Gio Black Peter Rudolf
Guido Sommer Adolf
Christophe Chemin Maximilian
Max Di Costanzo Amusement Park Zombie #1
Nicholas Fox Ricciardi Young Man in Hooded Sweatshirt
Keith Böhm Man in a Suit and Hat
Olivia Barth Woman in a Black Burqa / Woman on Subway #1
Stephanie Heinrich Old Woman

Make it a double feature

3h 8m together

Otto; or, Up with Dead People

Fucking Different XXX

Both from Bruce LaBruce.

More from Bruce LaBruceSee all →

Through the Night with...

Through the Night with... · 2002

Through the Night with...

SeriesTalkDocumentary

Durch die Nacht mit … is a German documentary film television series produced by ZDF for Franco-German television channel ARTE. Locations are mainly in France or Germany. The title of the French version is Au cœur de la nuit. Two Celebrities spend an filmed evening together. One of them is the host who sets the location and the program. There is no moderator.

Fucking Different XXX

Fucking Different XXX · 2012

Fucking Different XXX

In Fucking Different XXX, the passion for explicit sex scenes brought eight international filmmakers together. The eight short films shot in Paris, Berlin and San Francisco are about intensive sex, quick sex, romantic sex, funny sex, the first sex, and the last sex. The range goes from a lesbian quickie in the toilet, a bloodthirsty orgy, romantic fisting all the way to wet teenage dreams. The result is a never seen before look upon sexual tastes and varieties, far from clichés, with a fresh and sometimes humorous approach.

The Troublemakers

The Troublemakers · 1990

The Troublemakers

The lives of four down-on-their-luck characters. Surrounded by the vestiges of conspicuous consumption, they struggle to survive outside of society, fashioning their own aesthetics of poverty and devising strategies to navigate a surveillance society, evading or performing for cameras everywhere.

No Skin Off My Ass

No Skin Off My Ass · 1991

No Skin Off My Ass

MovieDramaRomance

A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of "That Cold Day in the Park" then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his sister, who's making a film called "Sisters of the SLA." He helps with a screen-test. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. Fantasies can come true.

Boris Without Beatrice

Boris Without Beatrice · 2016

Boris Without Beatrice

Living somewhere in present-day Quebec, Boris Malinowski has achieved all his goals. A freethinker, open-minded and proud, he also displays a certain arrogance when it comes to his successes. For some time now, his wife Béatrice, a Canadian government minister, has been bedridden, suffering from a mysterious depression. To escape from his wife’s agony, Boris begins a relationship with a colleague, Helga, and gets close to Klara, a young woman who works as a maid in Boris’s home. The sudden appearance of a stranger in his life forces Boris to come face-to-face with the world, with everything he takes for granted, with all his certainties.

Super 8½

Super 8½ · 1994

MovieComedyDrama

A down-on-his-luck adult film star sees a chance to make a comeback via a lesbian documentary film-maker, but she is exploiting him to get financial backing for her pet project.

Gerontophilia

Gerontophilia · 2013

MovieRomanceComedy

Lake is in a straight relationship with Desiree but finds himself becoming attracted to men at the pool. When he cannot control his desires any longer, he starts working at an adult home and begins a relationship with a much, much older man.

The Raspberry Reich

The Raspberry Reich · 2004

The Raspberry Reich

MovieDramaAction

Gudrun has modeled her amateur German terrorist group after the 1970s Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang). She attempts to imitate her heroes by kidnapping the son of a wealthy industrialist and hopes to negotiate leftist demands from the father. When Gudrun’s not spouting leftist verses (including during a hilariously brilliant fuck session), she’s trying to convince her all-male gang to abandon their heterosexuality, which she believes is the result of mass delusion.

Saint-Narcisse

Saint-Narcisse · 2021

MovieComedyDrama

Dominic’s fetish is… himself. Nothing turns him on more than his own reflection. That’s why discovering that he has a twin brother, raised in a remote monastery by a depraved priest, causes him major consternation. Fate brings the two young men back together again, and their fraternal relationship is torn between sex, revenge and redemption.

Hustler White

Hustler White · 1996

MovieRomanceComedy

Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, the action is transposed from the silver screen's old backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the pornographic industry.

Boy / Girl

Boy / Girl · 1987

In LaBruce’s first short experimental super 8 film, a loose narrative is constructed out of a variety of film clips, some shot on location by the filmmaker, some found footage, and some shot off the television screen. A woman with long red hair (G.B. Jones) sits on a window sill and looks down with her binoculars at the street below. Meanwhile, Mary Tyler Moore escapes from an aggressive man and runs to the park. Boy/Girl is a documentation of a period of time when filmmaker LaBruce lived in a crummy, squat-like building at Queen and Parliament Streets in Toronto with the all-girl punk band, Fifth Column.

Pierrot Lunaire

Pierrot Lunaire · 2014

Pierrot Lunaire

MovieMusicDrama

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing

30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing · 2019

30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing

MovieComedyScience Fiction

Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.

Sugar

MovieDramaRomance

Cliff receives an unusual 18th birthday gift from his younger sister — marijuana, alcohol, a subway token and the mission to lose his virginity. This results in Cliff meeting a young street hustler named Butch. At first, as Butch introduces Cliff to gay street life in Toronto, Cliff is excited by his new relationship. But as the two grow closer, he finds that Butch has problems, including drug addiction, that are cause for serious concern.

The Visitor

The Visitor · 2024

London, today. A refugee washes up naked in a suitcase on the bank of the Thames. The enigmatic, sexually fluid stranger introduces himself to a bourgeois, upper-class family, who invite him to stay on as an employee. The Visitor soon seduces each member in a series of explicit sexual encounters. He will turn their world upside down as they can redefine themselves in new, radical ways.

Bowels of Hell

Bowels of Hell · 2026

Malu is organising a gender-reveal party for a pregnant influencer – while dealing with her own grief, her persistent constipation problems and her adolescent transgender child (who disapproves of her job commission). At the condominium where Malu lives, some strange phenomena are unleashed in the home’s most private zone: the bathroom.

More Like This

Esteros

Esteros · 2016

MovieDramaRomance

Childhood friends Matías and Jerónimo reach adolescence and experience sexual attraction to each other, before being separated by circumstances. Later, as young adults, they meet again, and the film follows themes of complicated relationships and sexual tensions, as well as issues of homophobia.

Three Months

Three Months · 2022

MovieDramaComedy

Caleb, a South Florida teen, loves his camera, his weed and his grandmother. On the eve of his high school graduation, everything changes when he's exposed to HIV. While he waits three months for his results, Caleb finds love in the most unlikely of places.

Night of the Comet

Night of the Comet · 1984

Night of the Comet

MovieComedyHorror

After a comet wipes out most of life on Earth, two Valley Girls find themselves fighting against cannibal zombies and a sinister group of scientists.

Brüno

Flamboyantly gay Austrian television reporter Bruno stirs up trouble with unsuspecting guests and large crowds through brutally frank interviews and painfully hilarious public displays of homosexuality.

Rate this film

Your ratings make Midnight smarter