Dead Alive AKA Braindead
(1992) 104 min.
Rated: R (Extremely Gory)
Country: New Zealand
Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Timothy Balme, Diana Peñalver, Elizabeth Moody, Ian Watkin
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★★☆
A man’s oppressive mother is bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey and chaos ensues.
Synopsis:
The dangerous and feared Sumatran Rat-Monkey is caught on an expedition and is shipped to a New Zealand zoo.
In Wellington, 1957, a corner store clerk named Paquita (Peñalver) is hoping to find love. She has her fortune told and meets a customer named Lionel Cosgrove (Balme) who happens to be the man she’s fated to love. Lionel, however, is under the thumb of his domineering mother Vera (Moody).
When Lionel takes Paquita out to the zoo on their first date, Vera spies on them from behind some trees and ends up getting bit by the hyper aggressive rat-monkey, who she then stomps on until dead. She feigns agony so Lionel can take her home, thus ending his date.
That night Paquita returns to the house to return Lionel’s coat. He sneaks her through his window and they share a night of passion. Meanwhile, Vera has restless sleep in agony while her wound festers and grows worse.
The bite has made Vera very ill, and Lionel does his best to take care of her. Paquita shows up with her dog and Vera consumes the dog, to Paquita’s dismay. She tries to attack Paquita but Lionel fights with his mother and she rolls down the stairs with him. She’s gravely ill and a nurse tries to help her, but she dies. Soon, though, she turns into a zombie and attacks the nurse, killing her and turning her into a zombie as well. Lionel manages to shove both zombies away and lies to Paquita, telling her that his mother went to the hospital.
Lionel manages to get tranquilizers from an animal vet and manages to tranquilize the two zombies. However, Vera escapes and runs down the town towards the corner shop where Paquita and Lionel are talking. She gets hit by a trolley and flies into the shop. Lionel discreetly tranquilizes her again and the townspeople assume she is dead.
Again, at Vera’s funeral he attempts to tranquilize her.
That night, Lionel tries to dig up his mum, but is stopped by a few delinquents. One of them pisses on the grave of Vera, but she crawls out of the dirt and attacks the man, sending the young men screaming in fright. The local priest hears the noise and goes to help. He does martial arts-style moves and manages to fight off the zombies saying “I kick ass for the Lord!”. The priest does an excellent job of beating up the zombie-thugs, but as he decapitates one with a roundhouse kick, the head lands on his shoulder and bites him. The priest then gets impaled and dies.
The next day Lionel is caring for the zombies at his home by feeding them food laced with tranquilizers. He has to care for each of his “guests” like babies and feed them by spooning in food, etc. As Lionel’s uncle Les (Watkin) comes to visit, since Vera’s dead, the Zombie Priest and Zombie Nurse have have sex in the kitchen. Uncle Les hears the sex and thinks Lionel has found his father’s old stag films. As a result of the coitus, the Zombie Nurse is pregnant.
As Lionel gets more tranquilizers, Paquita sees him. He tries to avoid her and ends up telling her he’s sorry and “goodbye”. She cries and he turns back to comfort her but is driven away by a delivery man who is trying to protect Paquita.
Back at home, Lionel finds that the Zombie Nurse has given birth to a Zombie Baby. Lionel spends some time trying to take the Zombie Baby out for fresh air, but ends up beating it and putting it in a sack. He sees Paquita out for a walk with the delivery man and goes home looking sad. At home he finds that his uncle had found out about the zombies he’s storing and intends to blackmail him. In exchange for Les’ secrecy he wants Vera’s money and the house.
Uncle Les demands that Lionel bury the zombies as he proceeds to throw a very raucous party in the house. Paquita sees Lionel’s house having a huge party and goes inside. Paquita wanders into the basement where the zombies are kept and Lionel manages to fend off a zombie attacking her. She realizes he has been keeping them and tells him he must destroy them, but Lionel is reluctant. She convinces him that these things are not people and so Lionel manages to inject poison into the zombies and bury them.
Soon Lionel realizes that he injected the zombies with an animal health serum and the zombies pop out of the ground super powered. They manage to rampage through the party and turn almost all the party guests into zombies.
At one point Lionel, while hiding in the attic finds the remains of a woman who seems to be his father’s mistress. Lionel comes back into the house wearing a lawnmower to mow down the zombies in a festival of blood and gore.
Vera comes back from the ground as a hulking creature and breaks through the floor, chasing Lionel and Paquita to the roof. Lionel confronts his mother about how she drowned both his father and his father’s mistress.
Vera opens her belly and pulls Lionel inside but he manages to cut through her using a medallion that Paquita gave him. This kills Vera. He rescues Paquita from falling off the roof and they zipline to the ground safely. Meanwhile, the house is engulfed in flames from previous events of the zombie chaos.
Firefighters arrive on the scene to battle the flames as neighbors look on in concern. Paquita and Lionel smile at each other, kiss, and walk off hand in hand.
Review:
Firstly, this film is a comedy and a horror movie. It seems to be slightly influenced by The Evil Dead in that it’s both slightly funny and it contains a lot of gore. I’ll have to go one better and say that this film is really really covered in buckets of blood by the zombie-party crash scene. There’s so much blood and random dismemberment it’s hard to keep track of. But it’s all pretty silly and fairly entertaining.
One thing I liked about this film is the pacing. It goes along at a nice pace and keeps things interesting. It’s not a deep movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s having fun. I think I fell in love with the movie right around the priest’s martial arts scene.
The gore wasn’t exactly scary, but it was extremely plentiful. It was shown in a very comedic way. Intestines crawling along and trying to strangle people. Hands sticking fingers up noses. Dramatic sprays of blood everywhere. It was all frenzied but fun. A lot of puppetry and animatronics were used in this film and used well. There’s a bit of gross-out and juvenile humor in this film. For the most part, aside from the outrageous amounts of gore, the film is pretty tame.
I can’t help but recommend the film to anyone who has ever liked their horror with a side of comedy and load of blood, not to mention a happy ending.
Notes:
Unfortunately there’s no real uncut version of this film in the US. The version I watched was unrated, but had some snippets cut. Here’s the difference.
