Director: Peter Jackson
Stars: Timothy Balme, Diana Peñalver, Elizabeth Moody
It’s a classic love story. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy’s overbearing mother disapproves, but gets bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey and turns in to a festering, pus-filled zombie, converting the rest of the town in to hordes of the undead and causing boy and girl to fight for their lives in a literal bloodbath…
You never forget the first time you see someone take a running lawnmower to a roomful of zombies. If my brain is anything like Pixar’s INSIDE OUT, that is definitely a core memory.
Peter Jackson’s BRAINDEAD, or DEAD ALIVE as it was retitled for American consumption, is far from what I would consider a bad movie. It’s utterly disgusting and unhinged in the best way possible, with next-level gore that has rarely, if ever, been topped even decades later. The fact that the guy who made this movie would be given the reins to a gigantic budget adaptation of LORD OF THE RINGS still blows my mind.
There is a wacky quality to DEAD ALIVE and its goofy yet gross sense of humor, which is why I think people keep recommending it for Awfully Good. To be fair, any movie that features a priest who’s idea of “divine intervention” includes using kung fu to “kick ass for the Lord” deserves your attention, so let’s dig in.
DEAD ALIVE follows Lionel, a softspoken New Zealander whose life is controlled by his horrible, domineering mother. He’s in love with local shopkeep Paquita, a romance his mom completely forbids. But wouldn’t you know it, the same day Lionel breaks free to go on a date, Mother gets bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey, a creature whose saliva, unbeknownst to everyone, causes death and a truly nasty reanimation. Lionel’s mother quickly gains an appetite for human flesh and starts literally falling apart in a gooey, slimy mess. (The site of the elderly woman eating her own appendages should be an amuse bouche for what’s to come.) Ever the loving son, Lionel attempts to cover up for his mom instead of killing her, bringing back all of her zombie victims to drug and chain them up in his basement.
What results is a study in escalation and hijinks. Things just keep getting worse and worse for Lionel as he tries to stop the zombie scourge from spreading AND hide his secret from Paquita and the rest of the town. It’s also where DEAD ALIVE truly goes off the rails (in a good way), offering up things you never thought you’d see committed to celluloid: Karate Priest taking on a zombie biker gang, multiple dinner scenes that might make you throw up yours, and zombie sex that somehow leads to a zombie baby. And if that’s not enough, there’s an entire stretch of this movie where the main character actually tries to raise zom-baby, taking it to a park only to violently and publically assault it when misbehaves.
If you think the sight of a man stomping on an infant in front of a crowd of horrified mothers is bad, it’s relatively tame compared to what goes down in the last half hour of this movie, when a group of partygoers show up at the house and get turnt (into zombies). The kills and gore here are insane, to the point of being cartoonish. I honestly don’t want to ruin any of the surprises for anyone who hasn’t seen DEAD ALIVE before. You can check out the Best Parts video for a taste, but just know that at the time, this film qualified as the bloodiest movie ever made in terms of sheer volume of red stuff used in the final lawnmower sequence.
The script is a perfect example of the importance of balancing tones, offering a mix of legit scares, wince-inducing gross-out gags, and eye-rolling laughs—all in one package. Jackson and partner Fran Walsh really commit to everything; it takes a certain confidence to force someone to deliver the exchange:
“Your mother ate my dog!”
“Well, not all of it.”
Speaking of, all the actors do fine work here, but no one better than Timothy Balme as Lionel, who has an amazing sense of comedic timing for both the dialogue and the physical slapstick, nailing both and carrying pretty much the entire film. With someone less convincing in the lead role, DEAD ALIVE would never work.
However the real selling point of the film has to be the unending display of amazing practical effects from Richard Taylor and the fine folks at Weta Workshop. Everything is not just well-executed, but also exceedingly creative and clever in how they pull it off. There’s ribcages ripped out whole, torn off skin, torsos split in every conceivable fashion, body parts put through other body parts—you name it. The effects team also understood the tone, changing things up when something is meant to be horrifying versus live action Looney Tunes. If this was made today (especially by Jackson) it would be all CGI, but in 1992, Weta opted for a bit of everything—prosthetics, puppetry, stop motion—and everything looks amazing. The enormous Mother puppet at the end is truly a spectacle.
DEAD ALIVE reportedly cost $3 million to make and absolutely every penny is onscreen. It’s mind-blowing the amount of stuff they pulled off in this film under the circumstances, with every shot packed with visual goodness. It’s worth watching for that alone, and if you have the stomach, the perfect splatter movie to close out the Halloween season.
Or kick off Thanksgiving! You’ll be really thankful for the zombie dinner scene where our hero has to pop open their heads and spoon food directly in to their gaping neck holes.
Take a shot or drink every time:
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Thanks to Ben, Aubby, Kate, and Tati for suggesting this week’s movie!
Seen a movie that should be featured on this column? Shoot Jason an email and give him an excuse to drink.