In what I think is a first for LaBruce (I haven’t seen all of his films), Gerontophilia is entirely boner-free, though its most potent sequences are the occasional sex scenes, which focus their increasing attention on the eroticization of aging skin. Peabody (Walter Borden), which quickly turns into a romance.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I contributed $25 to the film’s crowd-funding campaign, in exchange for occasional email updates and a link to watch the movie on Vimeo.) After getting noticeably aroused while giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an old man at the pool, Lake strikes up a friendship with the eighty-something Mr. Pitched on its Indiegogo page as a queer Harold and Maude (or “a reverse Lolita,” as the director puts it), the movie follows Lake (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie), a young retirement home employee who discovers he’s sexually attracted to the elderly. So it’s both a surprise and entirely appropriate that in Gerontophilia, LaBruce takes a much sweeter, softer approach than usual. Maybe the internet had to make smut innocuous before it became respectable, but if there’s one lesson Bruce LaBruce has taught us it’s that art and porn are not mutually exclusive. In debating the merits of un-simulated sex in cinema in the past, I’ve always argued that it’s only pornography if it has penetration in it, and even then it’s debatable. Over the past couple years, New York repertory film programming has been on a porno-chic kick (including Anthology Film Archives’ “In the Flesh” series, and Lincoln Center’s Radley Metzger and Walerian Borowczyk retrospectives), but that doesn’t make the fact that one of the most respected art institutions in the world is screening hardcore gay zombie porno any less significant. The Museum of Modern Art is commemorating the release of LaBruce’s new film Gerontophilia with a full career retrospective. Matthew (#7), it was the first real indicator that I needed to take Jerry Lewis seriously, thanks to his inclusion of The Bellboy in the #2 spot, right behind L’Avventura.) His list is perfect, and in addition to including both Dawn of the Dead (#4) and The Gospel According to St.
(The second time LaBruce significantly popped up on my radar was during my college years, when Sight & Sound polled him for their 2002 Top Ten round-up. If the terms “provocateur” or “enfant terrible” were invented for anyone, they were invented for Bruce LaBruce.
Zombie, the director has liberally mixed porn, camp and gore with varying levels of intensity. From 1996’s art-sleaze classic Hustler White to 2010’s XXX splatter extravaganza L.A. Thankfully, it wasn’t a snuff movie, but LaBruce has never been shy when it comes to violence, either. It was both exactly like and nothing like I’d imagined it to be, gritty and grimy and low, low, low budget (like all the best underground filmmakers, LaBruce makes cheapness feel like an aesthetic decision, not a hindrance) but also genuinely funny and sexy. I didn’t actually see the movie until well over a decade later, when it screened in 16mm in BAM’s essential New Queer Cinema retrospective in 2012. Like Nail Gun Massacre and Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red, whose oversized box covers I ran across at an even younger age, its reputation was based on a single image and grew over time, taking on almost mythic proportions in my psyche.
Among the usual staples ( Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Repo Man, etc.) reliably sat No Skin Off My Ass, whose home video cover - a very grainy still of two frail, naked young skinheads in a bathtub - made it look like a porno snuff movie. I first became aware of LaBruce’s work as a teenager, rummaging through the “Cult” VHS shelf at Tower Records. It’s a real testament to Bruce LaBruce’s reputation that the most subversive thing he can do at this point in his career is to make a movie without hardcore sex scenes in it.