Rating:

God, how I wish Peter Jackson had never found success with The Lord of the Rings. He deserved that success of course; those movies were great and we all know it. But thanks to all his Oscars and fame, he’s in a position where he’ll never again have to make a movie like Dead Alive (or, as it was originally called in its native New Zealand, Braindead), and that is too bad. A director of the status Jackson’s risen to couldn’t make such a movie even if he wanted to, I’d argue. It takes definite outsider status to get away with an achievement like this.

What achievement is that? It’s having created a film that, despite being in a genre known for its tastelessness and gore and bloodshed, rises to all new heights of tastelessness and becomes noteworthy for its gore and bloodshed. I say with no hesitation that Dead Alive is the single goriest movie, as measured in sheer gallons of blood, that has ever been made, and thank god for that. The gore is never stomach-churning because it’s all played for comedy, but still: there are blood and guts everydamnplace in this picture, covering every last inch of the screen. It’s breathtaking, really.

The movie focuses on young Lionel, a complete wiener of a mama’s boy who lets his hag of a mother boss him around and stifle his fun and cockblock him at every turn. Yet despite her obvious awfulness, Lionel dotes on her constantly; he’s like Norman Bates, except without the transvestism and murdering of innocents. One thing leads to another—as so often happens in movies like this—and eventually Lionel’s mum is bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey, a rare animal with mystical powers, specifically the power to turn you into a zombie when it bites you. And turn into a zombie she does!

Given the fact that Lionel’s such a wiener, he can’t bear to let people think badly of his mother by finding out she’s become an ambulatory corpse, so he sequesters her away in the cellar, along with an ever growing collection of people his mother’s chomp-happy jaws have happened to find. Of course, as more and more unsuspecting people are turned into unholy hellbeasts it becomes more and more difficult for Lionel to keep his living dead problem a secret and, as inevtiably happens with secrets, people soon find out. And that’s where the movie launches into the stratosphere.

A jillion zombies being maimed and mutilated in a jillion different highly creative ways, that’s what the movie’s final third is. And oh, it’s so very glorious. Severed heads get put in blenders, garden gnomes get jammed into necks. Light bulbs get stuck in faces, limbs are karate kicked right off of bodies. A zombie with a missing midsection lumbers around by holding onto his legs and moving them manually. A pile of internal organs not only attacks people, it also primps and preens itself upon catching a glimpse of its reflection. Babies are kicked, punks are flushed down toilets and people are quite literally put through the wringer. And then there’s the scene with the lawn mower.

Every gross-out gag you can possibly imagine is slapped up on the screen in full-size glory, with Peter Jackson never cutting away for reasons of modesty or taste. Each new moment of violence and splatter tops the one before it until the movie essentially becomes insanity embodied, culminating in a never-ending baptismal font of gushing blood, spewing viscera and everything awesome in the world. It’s the kind of thing that has to be seen to be believed; any attempt to describe it in words falls pitifully short. That said, let me present to you this exchange of dialogue as one tiny example of how this movie is so incredible it’s like fifteen Christmases rolled into one. Hark:

“Your mother ate my dog!”
(exquisitely timed pause)
“Not all of it.”Really, given that, what more do you need to know? If you haven’t yet seen this movie, you are missing out. Seek it out immediately and drown yourself in a waterfall of disgusting goop. No Halloween season can be complete without this kind of madness and mayhem. Watch it with someone you love.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Dawn of the Dead
• Halloween: Resurrection
• Red Letter Day
• Freddy Vs. Jason
• Halloween in September