Braindead (1992)
And the award for most inappropriately misleading poster goes to… Peter Jackson’s Kiwi splatterfest, Braindead. Here, the madness begins with the theft of a Sumatran rat-monkey, progresses to tap into Anthony Perkins’ over-protective Psycho “mother” vibes, with ears falling in custard, and ends with a descent into orgiastic chaos with a Wellington lawnmower massacre. I believe the locations from the opening “SINGAIA!” scenes were eventually reused in PJ’s The Lord of the Rings, and there’s also a neat Skull Island nod (the mythical setting of King Kong). The period aspects of Braindead never really occurred to me on first viewing, with its Teddy Boys, and girls with 1950s glasses and attire. There’s charm in the crudity of the model plane sequence; a cheapness I didn’t appreciate at the time, but thoroughly enjoy now. They use some clever forced perspective. I love the stop motion rat-monkey at the zoo, and find all that handmade stuff endearing and miss it in modern cinema.
An almost British sensibility to the character approach, makes Braindead a little easier to digest for me. There’s even a “God Save the Queen” (on a horse) opening. I can identify with elements of the misplaced pride at play, mainly from the matriarchs in my family. What the neighbours think is the most important thing, and to be embarrassed or shamed publicly in some way would be a fate worse than death – something taken literally here. The rebirth of our hero (Lionel), emerging again from his mother, Vera Cosgrove’s body, albeit this time a giant, monstrous version of her on the roof of their house, represents a changed man, finally on his own – not under her strict control, but independent, and free to love whoever he chooses.
There’s a sequence, in which a baby hangs from a light fixture, falls into a blender, is promptly ejected, punched through a window, hits a man in the bollocks, the man’s wig falls onto the baby’s head, and gardening shears are then used to cut the wig off. When have you ever seen or heard of anything like that happening in a film? In fact, to illustrate the madness of Dead Alive, I’ll list some of its most bizarre and unique splatstick moments.
We have Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine’s Forrest J. Ackerman with a brief zoo cameo, Fernando the devoured dog, a kung-fu vicar “Kicking arse for the Lord,” a semi-severed headed zombie nurse with a syringe up her nose chewing off a zombie vicar’s face while they copulate… impaled, a woman punched through the back of the head resulting in the fist coming out of her mouth, a guy gets his legs eaten and only the bones remain, a zombie baby is hurled against a wall and caught up on its umbilical cord, there’s a zombie (literally) in a toilet, and a head used as a football. The lawnmower slaughter could be the goriest thing ever committed to film. A zombie “Baby Selwyn” emerging from a woman’s face by tearing it open, is another unforgettable image. Also, perhaps most disturbingly (or hilariously?), a violent beating of the infant Selwyn in a park – punching the toddler (mainly realised as a puppet, but also briefly as a crawling, human-sized double in a onesie) in the face, slamming him into the ground, and beating him in a bag. It’s not for the faint-hearted or weak of stomach. Honestly, the film is so grotesque and disgusting that it’s solely for the extremists – people who can appreciate a sick sense of humour and perverted visuals.
Scarious Artists 