Back in my salad days of college, this used to be one of my favorite "ambush" movies, along with Meet the Feebles and Legend of the Overfiend. I'd say, "You've got to check out this movie. It's friggin incredible!" and then show them the movie, after which they would be part of the joke for future ambushes. I tried this last weekend on my newly crowned wife and her cousin. Unfortunately, neither of them got the joke.
What makes Dead Alive (or Braindead, as Aussies and horror purists might call it) such a great ambush movie is that this could possibly be the goriest film ever made. What made people want to become part of the ambush is that it is also hilarious and fun to watch.
Lionel (Timothy Balme, no smarmy comments there) falls for Latin import Paquita (Diana Penalver), who is convinced that they are to become "romantically entangled." Lionel takes her to the zoo, with his overbearing and controlling mother (Elizabeth Moody) spying in the background. Mum gets bitten by the vicious Sumatran rat monkey (which she promptly stomps the brains out of), gets comically ill, and dies. Since this is still early in the movie, she rises from the dead as a zombie and proceeds to kill and thus zombify everyone she comes across.
Director Peter Jackson (who's directing the upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy) knows how to disgust you and make you laugh, often at the same time. In an advanced state of decay (but pre-mortem), Mum's ear falls into her custard and then she eats it. We get a nice long sequence when Mum is stomping the rat monkey, brains oozing out of the creature's head, eyes popping out like grapes, interspersed with cuts to other zoo patrons grimacing and occassionally taking pictures. Almost points of gore are counterpointed by oddball Kiwi humor.
On my most recent viewing, I realized that Jackson hardly wastes a character or a scene. Bit characters are uniquely drawn to the point of being absurd. Even the usually personality-less zombies have boundless quirks and features, usually because of the damage done to them in their live state. The direction is slick and assured. Jackson uses objects to move between locales during a scene. In one particularly gore-streaked moment, Lionel accidentally nudges a severed zombie head across the room. The camera follows it to another set of characters, thus bringing them into the scene.
And who could even mention this movie without mentioning the Final Scene, aka The Party Scene. In twenty minutes of film that must have employed a battalion of prosthetics makers, Dead Alive manages to coat an entire house and the people inside with blood and viscera. These minutes are where Jackson really shines, in terms of gore and action. Inventive and fairly realistic dismemberment is the order of the day. People getting their ribcages ripped out, heads chopped apart at the mouth, and hands thrust through a head and out the mouth are just a few of the images that follow in almost rapid fire succession.
I've watched this one ten, fifteen times now, and it never gets old. It is excessively quotable, if you're into that, but not for the squeamish. So, you wanna come over this weekend?
DVDS. Director {$Peter Jackson}'s second feature cheerfully trumps the gross-out quotient of his splatterfest debut, the appropriately named {#Bad Tas...More at DeepDiscount.com
Peter Jackson master of subversive comedy presents the story of a hapless young man whose overbearing mother gets him into a heap of trouble when she ...More at Family Video
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