A Bruce LaBruce film is not for the fainthearted. Featuring transgressive sex, unsavoury politics, disturbing humour and a cast of characters that you wouldn't want to bring home to meet Mumsy, they are an acquired taste. But love him or hate him, it's hard not to feel excited about the new double DVD release of two of his best films: Super 8 1/2 and No Skin Off My Ass.
In Super 8 1/2, which was first released in 1993, LaBruce himself plays Bruce, a spent porn star who wants to make a comeback. Googi, a mercenary dyke film maker, looks as though she might offer him a way out, but in reality she's just exploiting him for her own project.
Unbelievably, this is a loosely autobiographical film (!) which begs the question: what is he like?! As is the way with LaBruce's films, it features a lot of graphic sex and somewhat creative plot machinations. Moreover, you'll win cinema points if you can spot the appropriated dialogue from Fellini's 8 1/2 and other films too smart and obscure to mention. But it's funny and cynical, if overlong, and has cameos from some of the denizens of the underground queer cinema, including Vaginal Creme Davis and Richard Kern.
No Skin Off My Ass, the second film in this double release, was originally screened in 1991. Again LaBruce stars in his own film, this time as a hairdresser who picks up a skinhead and brings him home for a grand seduction. Trapped, the skinhead escapes but soon comes to realise that maybe he liked LaBruce's attentions after all.
No Skin Off My Ass is partly a gay take off of Robert Altman's film That Cold Day in the Park, and partly an exercise in porn as art house. It also exhibits LaBruce's lifelong preoccupation with political extremists (the skinhead's sister is making a film called Sisters of the SLA - the Symbionese Liberation Army were a group of 1960s revolutionaries).
Another thing worth noticing is the appearance of the elusive GB Jones, the Torontonian dyke artist, also known as "the female Tom of Finland," who worked on some of the first queer punk zines with LaBruce. Queercore fans will love it!
Both Super 8 1/2 and No Skin Off My Ass are low budget. If you're looking for gloss you won't find it here, and if grainy images, dodgy dubbing and self-conscious acting get on your nerves then you'd be better off avoiding this one. But LaBruce is a film maker worth sticking with. His films are funny, imaginative, often beautifully shot with limited resources. In a world where gay life is often bland and uninspiring, his is a vision of queerness that is still provocative, fetishistic, pansexual and rude as hell. In these two films he has managed to create a new porn aesthetic far removed from the generic pecs 'n' ass of the mainstream gay world.
Super 8 1/2 and No Skin Off My Ass by Bruce LaBruce
Released by: Millivres Multimedia
ASIN: B000795L94
Catalogue Number: MMD036
Price: £19.99
Read our review of Raspberry Reich, by Bruce LaBruce
Get Super 8 1/2 and No Skin Off My Ass on DVD. Buy it online and save some money to put towards some other 'hard' gay films, Raspberry Reich, Skin Flick and Hustler White.