Building on the cartoonish creativity of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies, New Zealand director Peter Jackson pushed the sub-genre to the extreme.
Grade: B-
First came the alien satire Bad Taste, then the puppet musical Meet the Feebles perverted the Muppets.
But it was the splatter over-the-top movie “Dead Alive” that proved his potential.
Jackson produced and directed this gory zombie film two years before making his critical breakthrough, Heavenly Creatures, and nearly two decades before the massive franchise epic The Lord of the Rings.
Dead Alive deals with one of the horror genre’s most prevalent concepts: repression.
When Lionel’s (Timothy Balme) love for a local girl is no longer held down by his controlling mother (Elizabeth Moody), decaying zombie-like creatures emerge to act as horrifying expression of momma’s villainous control.
Dead Alive (aka Braindead) strives for “red humor,” a melding of slapstick and physical comedy with horror.
This idiosyncratic, zany effort includes, among other things, a zombie-monster momma and rotted ears and noses garnishing a Sunday chowder.
The plot follows Lionel, a young man living in South Wellington with his strict mother Vera. After Lionel becomes romantically entangled with a girl named Paquita, Vera is bitten by a hybrid rat-monkey creature and begins to transform into a zombie, while also infecting swathes of the city’s populace.
The movie is still shocking, from the cursed Sumatran rat-monkey, whose bite sets the mayhem in motion, to the excessive Grand Guignol finale, in which Timothy Balme’s newly orphaned wimp lifts a lawn mower and covers the floors and walls with zombie guts.
Made on a budget of $3 million, Braindead was Jackson’s most expensive film to date. Although the movie received positive reviews, it flopped at the box-office.
However, over the years, it has gained a cult following and is now regarded as one of the goriest films of all time.
