Braindead

I LOVE THIS FLICK!!! Probably the greatest splatter comedy ever made, because "Braindead/Dead Alive" is a fast-paced, gut-wrenching, disgusting, adrenalin-pushing and ultra-funny cult movie!!! The nightly martial arts-performance on the cemetery is as great as Lionel´s baby sitting-trip on the playground and the final zombie massacre at Uncle Les´ party beats everything you´ve seen before!! "From Dusk Till Dawn", "The Evil Dead 2"... just peanuts in comparison to the galore of blood´n guts that is featured in this film! I´m also a huge fan of Peter Jackson´s elder shots "Bad Taste" and the weird Muppet Show-parody "Meet the Feebles", but with this masterpiece the director was able to excel himself!! Not to forget the great performances of Timothy Balme as mummy´s darling Lionel, Diana Penalver as resolute Spanish chica Paquita, Ian Watkin as Lionel´s rockabilly-like Uncle Les, Elisabeth Moody, Brenda Kendall, Stuart Devenie... all great!!! "Braindead/Dead Alive" is one of the best party-movies you can imagine! Watch this together with your friends and you will laugh your heads off, I promise!!!

This film is truly the finest hour of the young, aggressive, full-speed-ahead Peter Jackson. Check your squeamishness at the door and get ready for proof that splatter can be played for laughs.

Not all the laughs are splatter-based. The opening scene shows a zookeeper waving a permit to a tribe of hostile natives about to kill him, shouting out "per-mit! Per-mit!" From there, the film descends into the inspired, amused lunacy of the splatstick. Look for the cameo of a young, thin Peter Jackson as a mortician's assistant. Also look for the minor hilarious characters- the Nazi vet, the idiot football player, and most famous of all, Father MacGruder, he of the film's best one-liner.

Timothy Balme is excellent as the nebbishy mama's boy who ends up taking on the whole undead world by himself, with a couple of mechanical aids. He out-Ashes Ash! Like any good zombie film, the end features waves of zombies, but many with unique and twisted personalities of their own. The best is, of course, zombie baby. It is shocking and yet hilarious to see what zombie baby endures, and yet survives (perhaps to live on in the long awaited sequel?) Ten stars, and five out of five blood splats thrown up against the wall (during the last half hour).

Peter Jackson's gore-fest "Dead Alive" - AKA Braindead- is a very funny, very bloody film. The story is pretty simple, but includes some ingenious plot elements - such as a budding romance between two very likable characters (Balme and Penalver), a psychologically distressing relationship between Balme and his mother and well scripted dialog.

Balme plays Lionel - a troubled, more or less housebound young man who has been forced to spend most of his time taking care of a domineering and psychologically damaging elderly mother. Penalver plays Paquita - his romantic destiny. Paquita is a charming young woman for whom English is (perhaps) a second language. Soon after they meet, Paquita notices some odd quirks in Lionel's behavior, and slowly begins to realize that there is something besides the usual male fear of commitment. Perhaps Lionel's cannibalistic zombie mother is to blame? Soon enough Balme is babysitting a whole family of living dead who he has to constantly inject with animal tranquilizers, and trying to fend off a despicable uncle who is trying to muscle in on his inheritance. Then the fun really starts. It's the Dead Alive Series with extra gore, infused with brilliant slapstick and just a pinch of Monty Python.

Balme is amazing! - an excellent physical actor with great slapstick pacing and manic anxiety. And Penalver is delightfully pretty and sincere yet gives a nice campy performance. Dead Alive is one of the films in which Jackson began to blend detailed ecstatic and fantastic elements into his plots and cinematography - later culminating in the disturbing Heavenly Creatures and the spectacular LOTR trilogy. In Dead Alive, he finds his formula and makes it work without a tremendous budget. The film is well shot and grotesque, but remarkably amusing.

DEAD ALIVE (1993) ***1/2 New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson made his mark in horror cinema (and for himself as a talent to be reckoned with) in this incredibly gory, funny and altogether sickfest zombie flick about a young man's shrew mother getting bit by a Sumatran Rat Monkey rabid with a truly nasty disease that turns her (and all that she infects with a bite) into a crazed/ravenous thing that can't be stopped in its rapacious wake of terror. The scattershot breakneck pace makes fellow monster maven Sam Raimi look like Busby Berkeley! Classic cult film that will have you laughing at the putridness of it all. Look for Jackson's homage to "King Kong" with Skull Island reference at film's precredit sequence.

I think it's called the sweet spot, that place when everything comes together at the right moment: the build up has been great, the levels on all the gauges are optimised, you have all the ingredients, the recipe for success has been perfected and then you unleash the beast, and what a butcher of a beast you unleash!

If you dig too deep for the secrets or contrast it with today you'll end up burying yourself however, do be mindful and in awe of the immense crafts these artisans had developed in the early 90s and, above all, revel in the way those talents were recombined to produce a true work of ground breaking genius that will keep those fascinated by such majesty capitated, bowled and limbed for as long as is inhumanly possible.