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So you’ve seen Sam Raimi’s ‘Evil Dead’ and ‘Evil Dead 2’. Loved Bruce Campbell going medieval on the zombies with his chainsaw? Want more? Look up Peter Jackson’s
‘Braindead’ (or Dead Alive) sometime.
The similarities between the two movies are impossible to miss. While they may share the premise, the execution is vastly different. ED went for the abandoned woods, but Braindead prefers to hit the city. Oh, and I must add here that I consider all three (ED, ED 2 and Braindead) to be comedies. Sure, some people swear by ED as the ‘scariest film of all time’, as it says on the DVD jacket, but even that was a tongue-in-cheek statement by Sam Raimi.
Braindead is the bloodiest film I’ve ever seen. And the imdb trivia section says it is one of the bloodiest films ever made, if not the bloodiest film ever made. Who would have thought that blood could be so funny?
The film opens on Skull Island (presumably not that Skull Island), where a New Zealand zoo official procures a ‘Sumatran rat monkey’. While transporting it out, he gets bitten, and the locals ‘contain’ the infection. The rat monkey is shipped to NZ.
Lionel Cosgrove is man lorded over by his domineering mother. When he meets Paquita, and takes her to the zoo, his mother follows. While spying on them, she comes in contact with the rat monkey, which bites her on the arm. After Mother squishes the rat monkey’s head (no, really), she is taken home and bandaged. But, the infection spreads, and she dies. Sort of. She comes back to life and with other infected denizens (she’s the queen bee of sorts), eats everything in her path, including a dog and a nurse. Lionel and Paquita do their best to stop the zombies (As Radiohead put it, ‘The best you can is good enough’).
This film contains enough blood for Dracula to get hung over. It contains one great scene after another, including one with a kung-fu priest (Holy crap can he kick ass, and in the name of the Lord!) and another in which a zombie baby is pummelled repeatedly. Oh, did I mention that there are copious amounts of blood? Almost every scene has something oozing, something squirting and someone getting sprayed with a semisolid substance that is either pink or red in colour. While Raimi made his blood green, Jackson keeps it red.
But, this isn’t horror. Really, it isn’t. If you thought Kill Bill Vol. 1’s fight at the House of Blue Leaves was over-the-top, be prepared to alter your stance once you see the house massacre here. I don’t want to spoil it, but Lionel uses something similar to Bruce Campbell’s chainsaw. I’ll leave it at that. The gore here is ludicrous. The only thing you can do is laugh. Ears fall off. A guy gets his face peeled off. Hand enters through the back of the head and exits through the mouth. Slit Throat. Meat cleaver through the head. Baby bursting through a head. And many many more. Oh, there’s some zombie sex too.
The principal actors are adequate in their roles, but in general, good acting is a bonus in this type of film. Timothy Balme (Lionel), who bears a passing resemblance to Linus Roache is likable, though he is overshadowed by the bubblier Diana Peñalver (Paquita), the sleazy Ian Watkin (Uncle Les) and the bossy Elizabeth Moody (Mum). Special mention to the a*se kicking Stuart Devenie (Father McGruder).
The director is Peter Jackson. He of ‘King Kong’ and ‘Lord of the rings’. After seeing this film, I can see why he was selected to helm LotR. Yes, he had also made ‘Heavenly Creatures’, but there is nothing like a good low budget splatter fest to make the head honchos sit up and take notice (Sam Raimi went on to make ‘Spider Man’ too). The man has an overactive imagination. The film is loaded with irreverent humour and subtle in-jokes that pay homage to older genre films. The special effects add to the camp value, looking fake but delightfully bloody.
While the film worked magnificently as a splatter comedy, Jackson tries for something more, and that’s where he stumbles slightly. Subplots about Lionel’s father’s death, and Lionel’s struggle to find the words to tell his controlling mother to shove it (their relationship is similar to Norman Bates and Mother from ‘Psycho’) felt slightly superfluous, and could have been excised. Then again, all the movie actually requires is some semblance of a story (replete with cheesy one liners), and that it does have. Personally, when watching films such as these, I turn a blind eye to leaps of logic and plot inconsistencies (there are a few).
When the film was first released in India (I guess sometime in the early ’90s), I remember seeing posters of the film and being terrified. It had a cleaver going through a person’s head. Quite emphatic. But, a decade or so later, having seen the film, I can only look back at an inconsquential memory with fondness. All in all, this is the most fun I can ever have (and I mean ever) without slaughtering my own family with a pitchfork (the film has that too).
Now if only Jackson had popped Frodo’s eyes out..
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