Director Robinson Devor has met our culture’s crying need for an artsy documentary about bestiality, and his film Zoo had its premiere during the weekend at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The premiere has led to the predictable string of reviews repeating the same factoids: bestiality isn’t (or wasn’t) illegal in the state of Washington; the Roman playwright Terence is credited with saying, “I consider nothing human alien to me”; and, by the way, Zoo was inspired by a man whose colon was fatally perforated during sex with an Arabian stallion.

Liam Lacey of the Globe and Mail writes this deadpan sentence about the emerging consciousness of a “zoophile”: “One participant, a janitor, explained that he didn’t realize he was ‘zoo’ until he subscribed to AOL.” Well that certainly cries for elaboration, which Lacey provides:

The men’s testimony is what would be called, in literary terms, “iterative” — an account of a regularly repeated activity. They would meet in chat groups, then the online discussion would move to a face-to-face meeting and then, a party out on the farm by a group of men who felt theirs was an almost utopian retreat from the cares of their lives with communal potluck suppers. (“One weekend, we did a turkey and a ham,” one recalls fondly.)

Good times.

Film critic Sean Means of The Salt Lake City Tribune is troubled — not by the film, but by people who have an opinion about movies they have not seen, whether the subject matter is sex with horses or raping a 12-year-old girl:

I was talking with this guy Saturday afternoon on the Sundance Film Festival shuttle bus about “Zoo,” the bestiality documentary I would be seeing that night.

“Everybody has their limits of what’s acceptable,” he said, adding that his limit was somewhere outside the theater where “Zoo” would be playing.

That guy has already made up his mind about “Zoo,” an artfully crafted and surprisingly tasteful documentary that centers on a man in Washington state who died from injuries sustained from sex with a horse. After that description, you have probably made up your mind, too. That’s OK, that’s your right as an American — just as it was director Robinson Devor’s right to make the movie in the first place. (Whether it was that Washington man’s right to have sex with the horse, that varies from state to state — though Washington at the time had no laws against bestiality.)

Sometimes, though, judging a movie without seeing it can have serious repercussions, especially if you’re getting on your soapbox about it.

Whew, I’m sure glad Mr. Means was around to sort out everybody’s rights and responsibilities. Just what the hell is in the drinking water in Park City?