That's my mother you're pissing on
A review requested by Mandy, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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Everyone knows who knows anything about Peter Jackson's third feature film as a director - first released in 1992 in its native New Zealand in a 104-minute cut titled Braindead, later in the United States in a 97-minute cut titled Dead Alive, with several different versions under one of those two titles throughout much of the world, based on local censorship rules - knows that it is A) preposterously gory, and perhaps indeed even the most gory film ever made, depending on exactly how you want to quantify that* and B) a frequently hilarious slapstick comedy that is only a "horror film" insofar as gory movies full of flesh-eating zombies are generally counted as horror by default.
As I say, though, none of that is news, though it is all unabashedly true, and I'll be getting back to it. But for right now, I'd like to try by not starting to talk about all the things we already know about Dead Alive (I'll be using the U.S. title throughout this review in deference to the fact that I've only ever seen the 97-minute cut; according to a longstanding rumor I can't trace back to a source, Jackson prefers this shorter version, having polished and tightened it in preparation for its trip across the Pacific). That the film has been made with extraordinary, obvious joy by a filmmaking team besotted with the idea of making a movie is so self-evident as to be at least somewhat boring to talk about. Instead, I'd like to focus on something that's at least slightly less obvious than the delight and the crassness of Dead Alive: it's also pretty clever, too.
The film isn't just a gross-out zombie comedy, though it's a good one of those. In the best tradition of secretly very smart gross-out cinema - by which I am primarily and maybe exclusively referring to the early filmography of John Waters - there's something merrily transgressive here. It's not just that Jackson and his co-writers, Stephen Sinclair & Fran Walsh, have made a disgusting movie. They have amplified how disgusting that movie is by their choice of setting and through the character relationships that are affected by the bloody events of the plot. Basically, this is a loving by merciless broadside against the norms of middle-class New Zealand society, taking especially great care to provide a vulgar travesty of all the things that Nice People find especially nice. It would take very little to push this too far - whatever it is, Dead Alive is certainly not a social satire in any meaningful, persistent way - but I think it's undeniably the case that the movie gets an additional charge from the distinct vibe of "fuck you" it exudes towards social climbers, domineering family members, organized religion, pretty much anything that serves to ground everyday life and make it "normal". This makes the abnormality in the film more aggressive, more vicious - and a lot funnier, to be frank.
The film opens with a little mini-homage to King Kong, a movie that plainly loomed large in Jackson's imagination; he'd remake it 13 years and several magnitudes of prestige later. And he'd do it without any of the verve on display in the opening scene of Dead Alive, where it's 1957, and a simply horrible shithead by the name of Stewart McAlden (Bill Ralston) is attempting to smuggle a rare animal off of Skull Island. That animal is called a Sumatran rat monkey, raising the question of why he's not trying to smuggle it off of Sumatra, but we're clearly in the realm of pastiche here: see also the acutely tasteless "ooga booga"-type native Skull Islanders who are chasing McAlden to stop him. For that matter, McAlden is a bretty broad caricature of humanity, an arrogant dick whose snarling, priggish attitude makes him a great candidate for a horrible death, and he gets one in short order: the rat monkey bites him in several places, and his native crew hack him apart with a machete to keep the poison from those bites from spreading. This should, in theory, end the movie, with the rat monkey staying behind on Skull Island, but instead, it ends up at a zoo in Wellington, and this is where we meet out actual main characters for the rest of the movie: Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme), a meek, simpering nobody, and Paquita María Sánchez (Diana Peñalver), who decides that it's her obligation to fall desperately in love with him after her grandmother (Davina Whitehouse) reads Paquita's romantic destiny in a tarot deck. And we get a particularly off-putting villain, too: Lionel's mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody), a cruel, domineering figure who has controlled every element of his life since his father's tragic death many years ago.
Basically, the story is a soap opera: an overly passionate ethnic type sneaks around with a clammy little milquetoast fella, while his mother plots to make both of their lives hell. There's more where that came from, too: Vera's attempt to wrangle a leadership role with the Wellington Ladies' Welfare League, and some real estate intrigue, when Lionel's uncle Les (Ian Watkin) starts sniffing around, and the coverup of a crime - of a series of crimes, in fact - of a full-on basementful of corpses, not to put too fine a point on it. Because as it's not really ever hiding, Dead Alive mostly wants to set all of this overheated meldrama up to immediately start subverting it: Vera is stalking Lionel and Paquita on a date to the zoo, and that's where she gets bitten by that same Sumatran rat monkey (after it has horribly dismembered another monkey in the next cage over). She gets her revenge on the spot, crushing its skull into a jammy pulp with the heel of her thick shoes, but the damage is done. Within days, she's rotting apart, and Lionel's attempts to hide this fact from the world amount to nothing at all. Worse yet, she has taken to biting people in an attempt to eat them, and... well, you know how the zombie thing goes. In hardly any time at all, Lionel has his mum, a nurse, a priest, and the leader of a gang, all locked in the basement, dead and starving. He's able to keep them mostly quiet with the regular application of industrial-grade tranquilizer, but Les has gotten very pesky since Vera's "death", and he blackmails Lionel into giving him the house, where he immediately stages a party. The party doesn't end well, you might say.
The film's emotional center is that terrible, hideous mother/son relationship, and its arc is in Lionel realising that doesn't owe the beastly old woman anything at all, and this gets us back to the chipper subversive qualities in Dead Alive. The whole thing is a revolting parody of domesticity, most notoriously including the birth of a zombie baby, but really the entire midpart of the film is a pretty straightforward perversion of the idea of the nuclear family. Lionel tries his very best to be a kind, attentive caregiver to his zombie brood; he play-acts at being father to a newborn, once the zombie baby is born. The sick joke being, of course, that he could be forming an actual family with Paquita, rather than the bastardised parody he's hiding from the world, but instead he's so committed to the hopeless attempt to keep his mother safe - this while she is literally starting to collapse into oozing piles of flesh - that he dumps Paquita cruelly and without explanation.
It's all fucked-up in a very lively way; the film doesn't really want to have any real sympathy or investment in any of its characters, not even Paquita (though she comes closest; at any rate, we have the fewest reasons to stand in judgment of her), so it becomes much easier to laugh at Lionel's clumsy failures at raising a zombie horde. He's never particularly sympathetic; and insofar as we root for him, it's because Vera is such a top-to-bottom nightmare, an image-obsessed racist and sociopath who represents a kind of middle class tastefulness that Dead Alive takes great joy in ripping apart.
Which gets me back to everything I delayed in talking about; but you can only put off so long discussing Dead Alive and not eventually getting to standing agog at just movie-ish it is. Jackson had already directed Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles at this point, a pair of thoroughly crude provocations; Dead Alive follows them, but it takes a considerable leap up in filmmaking prowess, and one can feel the crew pulsing with enthusiasm for just throwing things at the screen. It's an unrelenting movie: not just in its constant escalation of gore effects and gross gags until its climax has turned the foyer of a family home into a swimming pool of stage blood. It's also in things like cinematographer Murray Milne favoring close shots with wide angle lenses, giving the movie a bugged-out, warped look; it's in the way that the script keeps shoving zany and/or weird ideas out without worring too much about narrative logic or rhythm. This leads to the film's most beloved small character, surely, Father McGruder (Stuart Devenie), a parish priest who responds to the arrival of a zombie menace by transforming on the spot into the hero of a '70s kung fu movie - and Jackson's staging of the subsequent fight scene is an airtight pastiche of the style of those movies, I am happy to say. Not only does Father McGruder get the most happily ludicrous plot development, he also gets the two most happily ludicrous lines of dialogue, one right after the other.
McGruder is clearly the most random, bizarre, "I thought it would be fun" element in the script, and to that I say: yes, more of this, please. Dead Alive is, in a way, the pinnacle of Jackson's career: he was starting to become talented at the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking, but he still had the fearlessness of his gonzo dipshit ideas. Immediately hereafter, his films start to feel "respectable", culminating in him somehow managing to arrange the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to film the three monumental pieces of The Lord of the Rings, a project for which his unqualified according to literally every standard one could objectively measure. That obviously worked out for him, but I do think something was lost in translation: Dead Alive is a film with a facing pulse, a sense of charming delirum, a feeling of pure cinematic invention. After this point, his films all feel a bit clean, like he knew the rules and was following them, but wasn't going to let any sudden bursts of inspiration show up. Dead Alive is the work of an overeager, thrillingly talented mind; a celebration of the pleasure of horror cinema, of cinema, period. You can feel Jackson finding the limits and then charging past them.
It is, legitimately a joy to watch, record-setting gore and all. In principle, I understand that people get turned off by the kind of over-the-top grotesquerie in display here. In practice, though, all of the most repulsive content is presented with a beaming smile and a breezy light touch that makes even such things as "the intestines are getting wound up in a lawnmower blade" register as bouncy cartoon slapstick rather than actual horror. And of course, the entire notion of horror-comedy is build on the recognition that laughing and screaming are closely related, and the difference between slapstick and slasher is almost exclusive down to tone and emphasis. Dead Alive lays this bare to an unusual degree, since here it's all tone: this should be unwatachably ugly material for all but the most bloody-minded gorehounds. Instead, it's such a silly romp that even the notoriously strict British Board of Film Classification very nearly gave it an incongruously light rating, simply on the grounds that surely no viewer would take this any more seriously than the film itself.
Though, of course, Dead Alive takes itself very seriously: slapstick is a precision form, gore effects also, and while the tone is a lark, the construction of the film is drum-tight. The film was made with love, and that's simply all there is to it: love that manifests as careful, fussed-over craft every bit as much as a wild sense of humor or a fearlessly weird collection of story beats. It's just a deeply, deeply special film - certain of what it is and how it wants to be loved like almost nothing is - especially nothing as mercenary as a gore-driven zombie film. But plainly, this wasn't looking to make a quick buck; in the heart of one of the most cynical of subgenres; Dead Alive manifests not the slightest hint of cynicism.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*In this case, you'd have to quantify it as "the film that used the most stage blood, by volume", and I'm not even 100% sure that's true, or if it's just something the PR team whipped up that they knew nobody would actually bother to double-check.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
Everyone knows who knows anything about Peter Jackson's third feature film as a director - first released in 1992 in its native New Zealand in a 104-minute cut titled Braindead, later in the United States in a 97-minute cut titled Dead Alive, with several different versions under one of those two titles throughout much of the world, based on local censorship rules - knows that it is A) preposterously gory, and perhaps indeed even the most gory film ever made, depending on exactly how you want to quantify that* and B) a frequently hilarious slapstick comedy that is only a "horror film" insofar as gory movies full of flesh-eating zombies are generally counted as horror by default.
As I say, though, none of that is news, though it is all unabashedly true, and I'll be getting back to it. But for right now, I'd like to try by not starting to talk about all the things we already know about Dead Alive (I'll be using the U.S. title throughout this review in deference to the fact that I've only ever seen the 97-minute cut; according to a longstanding rumor I can't trace back to a source, Jackson prefers this shorter version, having polished and tightened it in preparation for its trip across the Pacific). That the film has been made with extraordinary, obvious joy by a filmmaking team besotted with the idea of making a movie is so self-evident as to be at least somewhat boring to talk about. Instead, I'd like to focus on something that's at least slightly less obvious than the delight and the crassness of Dead Alive: it's also pretty clever, too.
The film isn't just a gross-out zombie comedy, though it's a good one of those. In the best tradition of secretly very smart gross-out cinema - by which I am primarily and maybe exclusively referring to the early filmography of John Waters - there's something merrily transgressive here. It's not just that Jackson and his co-writers, Stephen Sinclair & Fran Walsh, have made a disgusting movie. They have amplified how disgusting that movie is by their choice of setting and through the character relationships that are affected by the bloody events of the plot. Basically, this is a loving by merciless broadside against the norms of middle-class New Zealand society, taking especially great care to provide a vulgar travesty of all the things that Nice People find especially nice. It would take very little to push this too far - whatever it is, Dead Alive is certainly not a social satire in any meaningful, persistent way - but I think it's undeniably the case that the movie gets an additional charge from the distinct vibe of "fuck you" it exudes towards social climbers, domineering family members, organized religion, pretty much anything that serves to ground everyday life and make it "normal". This makes the abnormality in the film more aggressive, more vicious - and a lot funnier, to be frank.
The film opens with a little mini-homage to King Kong, a movie that plainly loomed large in Jackson's imagination; he'd remake it 13 years and several magnitudes of prestige later. And he'd do it without any of the verve on display in the opening scene of Dead Alive, where it's 1957, and a simply horrible shithead by the name of Stewart McAlden (Bill Ralston) is attempting to smuggle a rare animal off of Skull Island. That animal is called a Sumatran rat monkey, raising the question of why he's not trying to smuggle it off of Sumatra, but we're clearly in the realm of pastiche here: see also the acutely tasteless "ooga booga"-type native Skull Islanders who are chasing McAlden to stop him. For that matter, McAlden is a bretty broad caricature of humanity, an arrogant dick whose snarling, priggish attitude makes him a great candidate for a horrible death, and he gets one in short order: the rat monkey bites him in several places, and his native crew hack him apart with a machete to keep the poison from those bites from spreading. This should, in theory, end the movie, with the rat monkey staying behind on Skull Island, but instead, it ends up at a zoo in Wellington, and this is where we meet out actual main characters for the rest of the movie: Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme), a meek, simpering nobody, and Paquita María Sánchez (Diana Peñalver), who decides that it's her obligation to fall desperately in love with him after her grandmother (Davina Whitehouse) reads Paquita's romantic destiny in a tarot deck. And we get a particularly off-putting villain, too: Lionel's mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody), a cruel, domineering figure who has controlled every element of his life since his father's tragic death many years ago.
Basically, the story is a soap opera: an overly passionate ethnic type sneaks around with a clammy little milquetoast fella, while his mother plots to make both of their lives hell. There's more where that came from, too: Vera's attempt to wrangle a leadership role with the Wellington Ladies' Welfare League, and some real estate intrigue, when Lionel's uncle Les (Ian Watkin) starts sniffing around, and the coverup of a crime - of a series of crimes, in fact - of a full-on basementful of corpses, not to put too fine a point on it. Because as it's not really ever hiding, Dead Alive mostly wants to set all of this overheated meldrama up to immediately start subverting it: Vera is stalking Lionel and Paquita on a date to the zoo, and that's where she gets bitten by that same Sumatran rat monkey (after it has horribly dismembered another monkey in the next cage over). She gets her revenge on the spot, crushing its skull into a jammy pulp with the heel of her thick shoes, but the damage is done. Within days, she's rotting apart, and Lionel's attempts to hide this fact from the world amount to nothing at all. Worse yet, she has taken to biting people in an attempt to eat them, and... well, you know how the zombie thing goes. In hardly any time at all, Lionel has his mum, a nurse, a priest, and the leader of a gang, all locked in the basement, dead and starving. He's able to keep them mostly quiet with the regular application of industrial-grade tranquilizer, but Les has gotten very pesky since Vera's "death", and he blackmails Lionel into giving him the house, where he immediately stages a party. The party doesn't end well, you might say.
The film's emotional center is that terrible, hideous mother/son relationship, and its arc is in Lionel realising that doesn't owe the beastly old woman anything at all, and this gets us back to the chipper subversive qualities in Dead Alive. The whole thing is a revolting parody of domesticity, most notoriously including the birth of a zombie baby, but really the entire midpart of the film is a pretty straightforward perversion of the idea of the nuclear family. Lionel tries his very best to be a kind, attentive caregiver to his zombie brood; he play-acts at being father to a newborn, once the zombie baby is born. The sick joke being, of course, that he could be forming an actual family with Paquita, rather than the bastardised parody he's hiding from the world, but instead he's so committed to the hopeless attempt to keep his mother safe - this while she is literally starting to collapse into oozing piles of flesh - that he dumps Paquita cruelly and without explanation.
It's all fucked-up in a very lively way; the film doesn't really want to have any real sympathy or investment in any of its characters, not even Paquita (though she comes closest; at any rate, we have the fewest reasons to stand in judgment of her), so it becomes much easier to laugh at Lionel's clumsy failures at raising a zombie horde. He's never particularly sympathetic; and insofar as we root for him, it's because Vera is such a top-to-bottom nightmare, an image-obsessed racist and sociopath who represents a kind of middle class tastefulness that Dead Alive takes great joy in ripping apart.
Which gets me back to everything I delayed in talking about; but you can only put off so long discussing Dead Alive and not eventually getting to standing agog at just movie-ish it is. Jackson had already directed Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles at this point, a pair of thoroughly crude provocations; Dead Alive follows them, but it takes a considerable leap up in filmmaking prowess, and one can feel the crew pulsing with enthusiasm for just throwing things at the screen. It's an unrelenting movie: not just in its constant escalation of gore effects and gross gags until its climax has turned the foyer of a family home into a swimming pool of stage blood. It's also in things like cinematographer Murray Milne favoring close shots with wide angle lenses, giving the movie a bugged-out, warped look; it's in the way that the script keeps shoving zany and/or weird ideas out without worring too much about narrative logic or rhythm. This leads to the film's most beloved small character, surely, Father McGruder (Stuart Devenie), a parish priest who responds to the arrival of a zombie menace by transforming on the spot into the hero of a '70s kung fu movie - and Jackson's staging of the subsequent fight scene is an airtight pastiche of the style of those movies, I am happy to say. Not only does Father McGruder get the most happily ludicrous plot development, he also gets the two most happily ludicrous lines of dialogue, one right after the other.
McGruder is clearly the most random, bizarre, "I thought it would be fun" element in the script, and to that I say: yes, more of this, please. Dead Alive is, in a way, the pinnacle of Jackson's career: he was starting to become talented at the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking, but he still had the fearlessness of his gonzo dipshit ideas. Immediately hereafter, his films start to feel "respectable", culminating in him somehow managing to arrange the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to film the three monumental pieces of The Lord of the Rings, a project for which his unqualified according to literally every standard one could objectively measure. That obviously worked out for him, but I do think something was lost in translation: Dead Alive is a film with a facing pulse, a sense of charming delirum, a feeling of pure cinematic invention. After this point, his films all feel a bit clean, like he knew the rules and was following them, but wasn't going to let any sudden bursts of inspiration show up. Dead Alive is the work of an overeager, thrillingly talented mind; a celebration of the pleasure of horror cinema, of cinema, period. You can feel Jackson finding the limits and then charging past them.
It is, legitimately a joy to watch, record-setting gore and all. In principle, I understand that people get turned off by the kind of over-the-top grotesquerie in display here. In practice, though, all of the most repulsive content is presented with a beaming smile and a breezy light touch that makes even such things as "the intestines are getting wound up in a lawnmower blade" register as bouncy cartoon slapstick rather than actual horror. And of course, the entire notion of horror-comedy is build on the recognition that laughing and screaming are closely related, and the difference between slapstick and slasher is almost exclusive down to tone and emphasis. Dead Alive lays this bare to an unusual degree, since here it's all tone: this should be unwatachably ugly material for all but the most bloody-minded gorehounds. Instead, it's such a silly romp that even the notoriously strict British Board of Film Classification very nearly gave it an incongruously light rating, simply on the grounds that surely no viewer would take this any more seriously than the film itself.
Though, of course, Dead Alive takes itself very seriously: slapstick is a precision form, gore effects also, and while the tone is a lark, the construction of the film is drum-tight. The film was made with love, and that's simply all there is to it: love that manifests as careful, fussed-over craft every bit as much as a wild sense of humor or a fearlessly weird collection of story beats. It's just a deeply, deeply special film - certain of what it is and how it wants to be loved like almost nothing is - especially nothing as mercenary as a gore-driven zombie film. But plainly, this wasn't looking to make a quick buck; in the heart of one of the most cynical of subgenres; Dead Alive manifests not the slightest hint of cynicism.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*In this case, you'd have to quantify it as "the film that used the most stage blood, by volume", and I'm not even 100% sure that's true, or if it's just something the PR team whipped up that they knew nobody would actually bother to double-check.
