Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or Up with Dead People just makes you appreciate how good Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie is. Despite its penny-dreadful title, that 1943 film not only cleverly “stole” the plot of Jane Eyre, re-setting it in Haiti, but was careful to present in vivid detail the cultural origins and practices of voodoo, of which zombie-ism is an offshoot.

Otto has no such interest in depth of any kind, preferring to take as its model, as have so many other like-minded current purveyors of genre fodder, the ineffably crappy, inexplicably popular Night of the Living Dead, only amping up the guts and gore in a “new” gay way. Yes, this film is about an invasion of gay zombies and centers around one named Otto (Jey Krisfar, dressed by the talented designer Rick Owens, and actually rather affecting in the impossible circumstances), as he gets up from his grave and stumbles his way through the streets and clubs of Berlin.

Sex and violence are married here in scenes wherein the zombies not only screw rapaciously (in LaBruce’s very patented and very un-erotic “hardcore” style), but rip out each other’s entrails and devour them as they do so.

There are torturous romantic flashbacks of Otto before callous lovers began to really mistreat him and even more torturous scenes involving an abrasive, loudmouthed movie director (Katharine Klewinghaus) who has cast Otto in her own gore-porno.