Dead Alive (1992)

Dead Alive (1992, NZ) (aka Braindead)

In director Peter Jackson's over-the-top, disgusting, bloody and gory R-rated splatter horror-comedy zombie film, it was his third full-length feature film following Bad Taste (1987, NZ) and Meet the Feebles (1989, NZ). It was indisputably one of the goriest, grossest, and bloodiest (and funniest) films ever made.

Its low-budget production (at 3ドル million) grossed only 242,623ドル - a major box-office disaster. Full of bad taste and cartoonish splatterings, some of the slapstick cult horror film's gory parts were often banned, edited, or censored. Its morbid gore and blood was reminiscent of Re-Animator (1985) and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987) .

The deranged film's tagline was:

"Some things won't stay down...even after they die."

• the film's premise was set up in a pre-titles prologue - on Sumatra's Skull Island in 1957, zoo animal explorer Stewart McAlden (Bill Ralston) and his assistant were attacked by spear-throwing, face-painted natives, for trying to remove a rare Sumatran Rat-Monkey in a cage from the island. The dangerous creation was a rabid, hybrid organism (part monkey and part rat) that resulted from the rape of tree monkeys on Sumatra's Skull Island by ravenous, plague-carrying rats.
• During a rapid flight from the natives, Stewart became the first human to be infected by multiple rat-monkey bites, with bite marks on his right hand, left arm, and also scratch marks on his forehead. His fearful guides amputated his two appendages before it was eventually decided to slice off his head with a machete, to prevent the spread. Animated blood splattered as his head was chopped off, leading into the title credits. Stewart's captured rat-monkey was flown in a crate to New Zealand's Wellington Zoo in the suburb of Newtown.

• shy bachelor, and clumsy, dweebish mama's boy Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme) lived with his oppressive Mum Vera Elizabeth Cosgrove (Elizabeth Moody) in an inner-city suburb of Wellington, NZ (Hataitai), in a multi-story Victorian mansion set on a hillside. The domineering and overbearing Vera developed an instant dislike for Lionel's growing romance with his first girlfriend - a sweet young grocery store clerk named Paquita María Sánchez (Diana Peñalver), a local Spanish shopkeeper's (Silvio Famularo) daughter.
• during their first date at the zoo, Lionel experienced a haunting, long-held memoriy of his father's death when he was attempting to rescue young Lionel from drowning at the beach. They watched in horror when inside the monkey cage, the nasty, vicious and super-rare, infected rat-monkey (SIMIAN RATICUS) dismembered another monkey's appendage and cannibalized it. The attending zoo keeper described the rat-monkey's origins:
  • "Story goes, these great big rats come scuttling off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkeys. You know, the natives use 'em in black magic rituals. Don't ask me how, probably suck the blood of virgins, eh, eh?"
• when Vera jealously followed them to the zoo to spy on the couple from afar, she slipped and fell up against the monkey cage, and was attacked and bitten in the left-arm by the rat-monkey: "Look at this! It bit me. I've been savaged! And my dress!" She angrily squashed its head with one of her high-heeled stiletto shoes to kill it.

• Lionel's date with girlfriend Paquita was ruined, and she was disappointed that Lionel chose to devote himself to his Mum rather than to her, although they made up that evening and Paquita strongly believed that he was her chosen one: "There will be one romance, and it shall last forever" - they slept together, although there were omens of death, dark forces, fear, danger and destruction foreseen by Paquita's grandmother (Davina Whitehouse) for the future.
  • [Later, the grandmother presented Lionel with a necklace/pendant in the shape of a pointed cross to wear, to protect him with "the power of the White Knight."]
• that same evening and into the next day, Vera began to show signs of physical deterioration, slurred speech, pus leakage on her arm and pulsating infection, face-skin peeling, zombification, a ravenous appetite for live flesh, and increased decrepitness.
• in an outrageous custard-eating lunch scene with Vera's friends, the Mathesons who represented the Wellington Ladies Welfare League, Vera accidentally squirted pus from her arm bandage into Mr. Matheson's (Lewis Rowe) bowl of porridge-pudding dessert, as he was noting aptly while taking a spoonful with his eyes closed: "Damn fine custard, rich and creamy, just the way I like it!" When her rotting right ear (with a pearl earring) fell off into her own custard pudding dish, Vera disgustingly ate it with the mush. The nauseated Mrs. Nora Matheson (Glenis Levestam) excused herself from the table to run off and barf before the couple fled.

• Shortly later, Vera's desire for meat compelled her to eat Paquita's dog in her bedroom. Paquita exclaimed to Lionel: "Your mother ate my dog!" He responded with understatement: "Not all of it."

• Vera seemed to succumb to her condition, after which she reanimated as a murderous zombie (Elizabeth Brimilcombe) and killed her attending nurse Mrs. Emma McTavish (Brenda Kendall) by attacking her face from behind, thereby infecting her as well. To prevent Vera and the Nurse from any more harm and from infecting others, Lionel pushed the two zombies into the basement and locked the door. He kept their confinement and condition a secret from Paquita. He then injected them with a sedative (animal tranquilizer) obtained from a veterinary office.
• Shortly later, Vera escaped from her imprisonment by busting through the door, but was hit by a passing tram in front of Paquita's store. Her body was propelled through the door and landed at Lionel's feet. He again tranquilized her with a shot of sedative to her nostril to subdue her.
• Lionel arranged for his mother's memorial service (led by Father Jon McGruder (Stuart Devenie)), funeral and burial in a church graveyard. Lionel's greedy and eagerly opportunistic uncle Les Kalkon (Ian Watkin) suspected that his sister Vera was deceased and arrived to attend the service - and to dispute the "inheritance" of the Cosgrove estate after her death. The despicable Les also attempted to come onto Paquita.
• During the service as the Father intoned: "Lionel, despite being deprived of his father at an early age, was blessed with an abundance of mother love," Lionel was with his mother's coffin in a back room. He approached her still-alive body in her coffin to once again tranquilize her - to prevent her from assaulting the mourners, when she burst out of the coffin and tried to strangle him. He crashed through the wall into the church service, disrupting the proceedings. The Father shockingly observed Lionel hugging his mother's corpse: "Well, I've seen some displays of grief in my day, but nothing quite like that."
• After the service, in the middle of the night in the cemetery, Lionel was digging up his mother's grave when he was attacked and robbed by a foursome of punk delinquents, one of whom - Thomas Jacob "Void" Randell (Jed Brophy) - was urinating on Vera's gravesite (Lionel: "That's my mother you're pissing on").
• Vera soon caused a zombie outbreak when she burst out of her grave, grabbed Void by the groin and disintegrated him and one his buddies, tranforming them into zombies. The alerted Father McGruder, actually a Kung-Fu Priest, attacked the two newly-enlivened zombies: ("This calls for divine intervention...I kick arse for the Lord") and kicked the head off of one of them, but it landed on his shoulder and he was bitten and also became 'undead.' Lionel was forced to continue to keep the sedated zombies: Vera, Void, the Father, and the Nurse in his home's locked and concealed basement, feeding them mush laced with tranquilizers.
• During an unexpected visit, Lionel's Uncle Les overheard the Father and Mrs. McTavish having loud sexual intercourse in the dining room behind closed doors and suspected something kinky was happening: "Ahhh, so you found your dad's old stag movies, hey?... Is that the one with the donkey and the chambermaid?" But then he left without any further questions.
• As a result of their zombie love-making, the Father and Mrs. McTavish produced a troublesome Baby Zombie Selwyn Matheson (Daniel Sabic) that was birthed almost immediately.
  • [Note: The zombie birth scene paid homage to the birth scene in It's Alive (1974), and was copied in Dawn of the Dead (2004) .]
• Lionel struggled in the park to take care of the aggressive, problematic baby. Shortly later, Les returned and discovered the zombies ("collection of stiffs") in the basement. He quickly blackmailed his nephew Lionel to relinquish his demands for the house and his inheritance, and then moved into Vera's luxurious mansion.
• Although Lionel objected, Les held an impromptu house-warming party to celebrate his acquisition of the Cosgrove property. Paquita entered the raucous house to find Lionel, where she was sexually-assaulted by Les - she kicked him in the groin. Lionel came to her rescue when she was attacked in the basement, and he and Paquita finally reconciled and got back together. She encouraged him to destroy the zombies. After all of them were injected, they were buried in the basement's soil.
• As Lionel and Paquita emerged from the basement, Les grabbed his nephew and threw him down the stairs into the locked cellar, where Lionel discovered to his horror that he had wrongly administered an animal stimulant (rather than poison) to the zombies in the basement - it only activated their condition. Paquita was again attacked by Les and this time dragged into a side room to be raped. She fought back while simultaneously, the 'family' of zombies burst out of the soil in the basement. Super-energized and super-strong, they emerged upstairs where they attacked the party guests in an extended sequence of complete chaos and mayhem.
• During the climactic party scene, one flesh-eating living dead zombie removed a man's rib-cage, while another's face was pulled off, while another woman had her heart snatched from her chest. One man's legs were stripped of flesh. A fist was punched through the back of a woman's head and emerged out of her mouth. Even severed limbs (entrails and bowels) could continue to attack after being cut away. The regeneration or reanimation of dead guests who were transformed into new zombies intensified the havoc.

• the punk delinquent Void, now zombified, chased after Lionel through a bathroom into the attic, even though his body was cut in half (and both parts moved separately). Even his intestines moved independently. He was able to eventually pull all his disparate parts together and launch one final attack, although Lionel escaped, but continued to be pursued
• In the attic in an old wooden chest, Lionel discovered B/W photographs of his father with a mistress, and then found the skeletal rotting remains of his father.
• The Zombie Baby Selwyn struck Uncle Les in the groin with a severed leg, causing Les to pursue the Baby into the basement where he discovered Lionel's mother Vera unearthing herself from the soil. She grabbed him in the groin and then obliterated Les by pulling him up, thereby stretching his lengthy spinal cord and head from his body (seen in a silhouetted shadow), as Baby Selwyn chuckled.
• Most of the horde of zombies were finally massacred in the infamous and climactic Zombie slaughter scene when dweebish Lionel strapped a running rotary-blade lawnmower (with the blades facing outwards) to his chest ("Party's over!") in the room full of party-crashing zombies - he sent buckets of blood, stringy intestines, spinal cords and body parts flying everywhere. After one pass through the zombies, he turned and grinded through them a second time. One decapitated head (with glasses) was chewed up in a blender. Paquita was able to destroy Les' zombified head by after spitting in his face by grabbing the attached spinal cord, swinging it around, and pounding it into a table-top counter.
• One of the most grisly images was of Baby Selwyn emerging from inside the body of bespectacled Rita (Elizabeth Mulfaxe), who had been zombified earlier from a bite. The baby's hands appeared on both sides of her head and pulled her face apart. At the same time, Zombie Mandy's (Tina Regtien) head (impaled on a lighted bulb) ignited, and Paquita added to the flames by opening the gas valve nozzle to set the house ablaze.
• Vera was now transformed into a gigantic, grotesque, bloated, naked, over-estrogenized, fertile monster with a distorted huge head and pendulous breasts. She appeared and pursued Paquita and Lionel to the rooftop (through a fireplace chimney) where she cornered them during a final stand-off, while the house was becoming engulfed in flames.

• Lionel confronted his mother about the reason for his father's demise, admitting that as a child, he had witnessed Vera drowning his father and his mistress in the bathtub:
  • "You don’t scare me, Mum! All my life, you told me nothing but lies! That stuff about Dad? None of that was true! You drowned them both, Mum! Dad and that blonde woman, you caught them together and you killed them, didn’t you?!"
• She had lied to him about the beach-drowning accident. Enraged, she opened up a cavity in her stomach and swallowed up Lionel by stuffing him back into her womb, to be with her forever. She enveloped him inside her opened-up body, declaring:
  • "No-one will ever love you like your mother!...Such a good boy!"

• She also tried to kill Paquita, who screamed in horror while dangling and hanging from the rooftop. Lionel retaliated by rebirthing himself - cutting his way out of her giant, blood-gushing womb with the sharp necklace (a pendant-cross) he had been given by Paquita's grandmother. He emerged from her bloody placenta, as Vera fell back into the burning house's roof while fire officials arrived.
• Covered in bloody gore, Lionel and Paquita kissed, embraced and walked away, together at last.