Organisers have cancelled the screenings of Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce's gay zombie film L.A. Zombie – which reportedly shows aliens engaging in necrophilia – after being rejected by censors.
The low-budget horror film, which features homosexual sex and full-frontal male nudity, is reportedly the first film in seven years to be banned from screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which is Australia's largest and starts on July 22.
According to the Guardian of UK, the head of the board reportedly told the event that the movie would be refused classification if any attempt were made to show it, effectively outlawing its screening.
Meanwhile, the director was quoted as saying in the Sydney Morning Herald that he is delighted his movie was banned.
"My first thought was ‘Eureka!’" said the Toronto-based LaBruce.
"I’ll never understand how censors don’t see that the more they try to suppress a film, the more people will want to see it. It gives me a profile I didn’t have yesterday."
He says his film was devised as "a reaction against torture porn."
"People come back to life [in my film], it’s a metaphor for healing."
He called the classification board "hypocritical" for banning his film while "they pass so many mainstream films that have the most extreme violence, with brutal treatment towards women, and torture and dismemberment, but because they didn’t show a penis, they can be screened with impunity."
LaBruce admitted that his film did have explicit scenes of sex and violence, but said the version that was banned from the festival was a "soft core" version, where "it’s obviously a fake prosthetic. It’s a bizarre-looking thing with a scorpion’s stinger, it’s clearly not a human penis."
The SMH also noted: "This is not the first time LaBruce’s films have been banned. Singapore has blocked several attempts by film festivals to screen his films, the British censors have insisted on the removal of scenes and segments from several of his films over the past two decades, before they could be released on DVD, and in Japan, his DVDs are distributed with a black dot hovering over the more graphic sex scenes."