Braindead (1992) Review

Tagline: The Goriest Fright Film of All Time!

Braindead (1992) Review

 

Director Peter Jackson’s name will be forever associated with Lord of the Rings first and foremost, but I think the runner up for his other most well-known film is his 2005 remake of King Kong. Jackson actually took audiences back to Skull Island over a decade before that, though, in the opening scene of Braindead, also known as Dead Alive in North America. Some explorers capture a vicious Sumatran Rat Monkey in 1957 and bring it back to a zoo in New Zealand, where it bites the overbearing mother of Lionel, a gawky man in the midst of an unexpected love affair with the local shopkeeper’s daughter, Paquita (who is convinced the two of them are destined to be together), but the bite turns the mother into a zombie, and a zombie outbreak ensues. This is not just some run-of-the-mill zombie story, though, it is an insanely fun gore fest.  

Right from that opening scene you get a taste of the violence and over-the-top carnage, but then there isn’t anything as shocking or gross until Lionel’s mom is bitten at the zoo. The effects are all practical, and some of them are pretty obviously fake, but most of them are quite convincing and very extreme. It’s funny to think the production team had so many of the same individuals who would later win Academy Awards for Lord of the Rings working on something as debauch as this. The Sumatran Rat Monkey is shown only a few brief times, created with very cheap stop motion effects, until Lionel’s mom steps on its head, then it’s a rubber puppet gushing blood and goo. After she starts turning into a zombie, the movie steadily builds up to greater heights of death and dismemberment, with Lionel trying to hide his zombified mom in the basement, along with a zombie nurse.

There are constant surprises all along the way, such as when the zombies are attacking in a graveyard, and the elderly priest reveals himself to be trained in martial arts. He declares “I kick ass for the lord!” but then still gets turned into a zombie, and once he’s undead his vow to celibacy goes out the window, too, apparently, because he impregnates the nurse with a zombie baby that gives Lionel a whole new set of problems. I don’t want to spoil every surprise along the way, but just know that there are many. It has some major Evil Dead vibes, and that’s important to point out: despite being so violent, it’s really comedic, too, not just all serious and revolting for the sake of being scary.

The last half hour is where Braindead achieves a unique level of absolute insanity. The house is full of zombies, and I can’t even begin to summarize all the creative moments of mutilation. Allegedly, 300 litres of fake blood were used for the ending, and every drop of it shows up on screen. Lionel charges through the horde with a lawn mower, and it doesn’t even come out of nowhere, this lawn mower gets set up earlier in the film. It’s quite a feat that one of the goriest films of all-time still manages to set up likable characters, a romance between them, and little payoffs like these, while at the same time feature moments like a zombie woman’s ear falling off into her custard and then eating her own ear.

Braindead is absolutely worth watching if you really enjoy violent, bloody films that are exaggerated to the point of absurd hilarity. It can’t be taken too seriously, but it is pure entertainment from beginning to end, with some of the most original zombie moments in all of cinema.