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Bruce Labruce has consistently stuck two middle fingers up at the status quo ever since he and G.B. Jones first began churning out queer punk zines and experimental movies in the late ’80s. As his directing career progressed from a Toronto basement to film festivals and beyond, the co-father of Queercore put those two middle fingers — and the other eight as well — to increasingly subversive use.

Films like “The Raspberry Reich,” “Otto, Or Up with Dead People,” and “L.A. Zombie” (which was banned by Australian censors in 2010) pushed the envelope with their explicit blend of taboo-busting sex and violence. Twincest, amputee fetishism, zombie porn… Nothing’s off the table for one of cinema’s most daring provocateurs, and that’s true again of his latest feature, “The Visitor,” which started out as a London art exhibition before washing up on German shores to premiere as a film in this year’s Berlinale.

Every year, we here at PopOptiq celebrate the month of October with a series of articles we like to call 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list to 200 movies, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles.

Note: Since there are so many great horror films and so much to choose from, I am not including documentaries such as Haxan — short films such as Outer Space – a mini-series such as Stephen King’s It — nor animated films such as Perfect Blue, Ninja Scroll and Coraline. I am, however, including some films as special mentions along with a few movies that some people consider horror films, but I don’t.

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Special Mention: King Kong

Directed by Merian C. Cooper...

Bruce La Bruce does not care if you’re offended. Probably the most respected filmmaker to also claim a robust oeuvre of pornography, his work often includes Bdsm, sex work, fetishes ranging from gerontophilia to amputees, castrations, and vampire sex. It is also biting social satire with a queer punk sensibility and a deep love of cinema, made by the X-rated love-child of John Waters and Robert Altman. Labruce’s newest film, “The Misandrists,” is true to form, but with one important difference: This time, it’s all about the women. And not just any women — it’s militant lesbian separatists trying to overthrow the patriarchy.

“It’s kind of an exploitation movie, or it certainly references a lot of exploitation genres,” Labruce told IndieWire during a recent phone interview. “There’s nunsploitation in there, there’s ’70s softcore sexpolitation films, which quite often have lesbian undertones. And there’s the reform-schoolgirl genre,...

There’s an odd sense of deja vu to Bruce Labruce’s latest provocation, recalling not just some of his own prior joints (notably 2004’s “The Raspberry Reich”) but tongue-in-cheek fantasies of much earlier films featuring the overthrow of patriarchy — the nearly half-century-old likes of John Waters’ “Desperate Living” and the Warhol-Morrissey “Women in Revolt,” in particular. The absurdist tale of “The Misandrists,” about a lesbian separatist army cell threatened by the arrival of a lone male strains “The Beguiled” through a funnel of camp comedy, variably explicit sex and Godardian radical-politic sloganeering.

Like every Labruce film before it, this German-produced, English-language enterprise doesn’t boast a plot so much as a concept, one whose steam runs out well before the (laboriously prolonged) end titles. Still, that happens later than usual this time, and “The Misandrists” further benefits from technical and design contributions more polished than are its auteur’s wont.

The current crop of acclaimed Quebec filmmakers shooting feature films south of the border speaks to an unprecedented infatuation on Hollywood’s part with French-Canadian directors.

Among the heavy hitters: Jean-Marc Vallée (“Wild,” “The Dallas Buyers Club,” HBO’s upcoming “Big Little Lies”), Philippe Falardeau (“The Bleeder,” “The Good Lie”), Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival,” “Sicario,” the forthcoming “Blade Runner” sequel), not to mention Xavier Dolan, who’s currently shooting his star-studded English-language debut, “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.”

But there’s another remarkably prolific, genre-bending Montreal filmmaker – an award-winning festival regular who has clocked in nine features, one medium-length production and shorts to spare over the last decade – who’s never shown much enthusiasm about dipping his toes in the American studio system. No matter how many prizes or festival selections his films rack up (Berlin, Cannes, Locarno and Sundance among them) or how many retrospectives film societies program about his work,...

Canada's Bruce Labruce has been one of the more notable cinematic provocateurs of the last couple of decades. Starting off in Toronto's queercore scene, he's won acclaim on the festival circuit thanks to the taboo-busting, sexually explicit likes of "The Raspberry Reich," "Otto, Or Up With Dead People," and "L.A. Zombie" (the latter of which was banned from the Melbourne Film Festival). So when his latest film, "Gerontophilia," opens with a blank screen over which we seem to hear a woman nearing orgasm as she recites the names of "female revolutionaries" including Lizzie Borden and Winona Ryder, you'd be forgiven for expecting more of the same envelope pushing.  Read More: Bruce Labruce Making 'Gerontophilia' A Rom-Com About A Teenager Who Develops Feelings For An 80-Year-Old Man But as it turns out, Labruce is having a sly play with the expectations of those who know his previous work,...

by Peter Knegt (November 6, 2008) "Honestly, I started getting tired of movies that treat zombies like worthless, homeless people who can be cruelly annihilated for sport," "Otto; Or Up With Dead People!" director Bruce Labruce told indieWIRE. "I thought it was high time for a zombie uprising, so to speak. I also thought it was time for a new homosexual revolution, so it made sense to combine the two uprisings." Perhaps Canada's best known and most controversial contributor to queer cinema, with films like "Super 8 1/2" and "The Raspberry Reich," Labruce's "Otto" makes its way to Us theatres this Friday at New York's IFC Center.