Roberto Pérez Toledo | Zombie Kiss / 2016

makeup

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Zombie Kiss / 2016 [4 minutes]

 

Pérez Toledo’s 2016 Zombie Kiss begins with two handsome young men making love and then eating large bowls of spaghetti as if to build up their energy for the night ahead. For it is the Spanish day for the celebration of what we in the US call Halloween.

     Using coloring dye, makeup, and cream lotions, they costume themselves as bloody zombies, both having evidently just been chewed upon. But the heart of the film lies in their decorating one another’s bodies, a haphazard but still almost ritualized affair, as they begin with red hearts and white dots that slowly become transformed into large festering sores. In their process of making-up one another there is clearly a sense, also, of ancient natives painting themselves up for war.

     They complete their costuming with a deep kiss before joining their women friends on a walk down the city street. The Spanish celebration of Halloween, based on the notion that on this day the dead come back to life as ghosts or zombies who roam the streets. That is why masks are not included in this celebration, so that the zombies can recognize human beings as one of them. Masks in Spain, says the narrative voice, are “just not a Halloween thing.” But here the film slightly shifts, as the men go down the street each hand-in-hand with a woman. “But, someday we won’t need to disguise ourselves anymore,” so the narrative intones, suggesting that even in 2016, these boys feel the need to pretend they something other than who they truly are: real human beings in love with one another.

      I find this work, despite its welcome message, the thinnest of the films of the talented director I am reviewing in this collation.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).