Dead Alive / Braindead (1992) Review
8/10
A Sumatran rat-monkey is shipped to a New Zealand zoo in 1957. A domineering woman follows her son on a date, the rat-monkey bites her, and she begins to deteriorate. Her son keeps her in the basement because the alternative is telling somebody.
The 8 is for a splatter comedy that’s about something and has the sense not to mention it. Lionel is a man in his twenties with no life, and every escalation in the film comes from him protecting his mother’s reputation instead of calling for help.
I had a damn good time with this film, the kind where I’m laughing and wincing in the same breath. Plenty of splatter comedies are just loud. This one got me caring about a sad young man and his awful mother and then buried the whole house in blood, and I respect the nerve of that enormously.
The deduction is for a middle stretch that circles, and for a first act that spends slightly too long on a zoo and a rat-monkey the film doesn’t really need. Everything after that basement door closes for the first time is the part where this film properly comes alive. That’s a poor choice of words and also just about the only correct one available to anybody.
It’s also, by a considerable margin, the most physically excessive film on this page and probably anywhere. The final sequence isn’t an exaggeration of gore conventions, it’s a demonstration of what happens when a director with practical effects and no supervision is given a lawnmower.
The Mother Is the Monster Before She Is a Monster
Vera is controlling, snobbish and entirely effective at it. She follows Lionel on a date, humiliates him in front of the woman, and the film establishes in ten minutes that this man has never made a decision.
When she’s bitten, almost nothing changes about the household dynamic. He feeds her, cleans her, hides her, apologizes for her, and lies to visitors. That’s exactly what he was doing before the infection.
That’s the film’s actual joke and it’s never stated. The zombie plot is a literalization of a relationship that was already unbearable, and the escalation is a man doing more and more appalling things to avoid an embarrassing conversation. The dinner party sequence is where both halves meet. Lionel has to entertain guests while corpses are moving in the house, and the social humiliation is played as more urgent than the corpses, because to him it is.
The custard is the high point of that sequence, and it’s the moment I’d point to if someone asked me why this film works. It’s hard to watch and it plays as a plain comedy of manners at the same time. A woman is eating, something is wrong with what she’s eating, and the host can’t say anything without admitting what’s in his basement. I squirm through every second of it.
A horror premise that literalizes an existing relationship doesn’t need to explain itself. The reader understands the metaphor and the film never has to acknowledge one exists. The rule is that the behavior mustn’t change. Lionel treats his zombie mother exactly as he treated his living one. That’s what makes the point. Escalate through avoidance. Every worse thing that happens is a consequence of not having a conversation. That’s both funny and recognizable.
Never let a character state the theme. If somebody says he needs to stand up to his mother, the film has become a lesson.
The Escalation Is Relentless
It begins with sedatives, then a basement, then more bodies, then a priest, then a party, and each solution requires a worse one.
The film’s structure is a chain of concealments, and Jackson keeps finding new ways for the situation to expand. A zombie couple produce a baby, which Lionel then has to take to a park, and the sequence is a parody of parenthood conducted with a corpse.
The custard scene and the ear are the two moments people remember from the middle, and both do the same job: they make an audience laugh at something it also finds physically unpleasant. The zombie baby in the park is where I think the film is at its most gleefully deranged, and I wouldn’t cut a frame of it. What keeps it working is that Timothy Balme plays Lionel entirely straight. He’s not a comic performer doing schtick, he’s an anxious young man in continuous distress, and everything around him is absurd. Diana Penalver does the same job as Paquita, the shopkeeper’s daughter who has decided from a tarot reading that Lionel is her destiny. She’s the only person in the film pursuing something she wants, and her persistence is what eventually gets him out of the house.
Father McGruder
A priest arrives, announces that he kicks arse for the Lord, and proceeds to show it with martial arts against a cemetery of the dead.
The line has outlived the film in most places and the character is a good piece of construction. He’s on screen for perhaps six minutes, is the most competent person in the picture, and is dispatched without ceremony. What the sequence provides structurally is permission. Up to that point the film has been a domestic comedy with corpses, and the priest establishes that this is a picture where anything can happen at any scale. His death also produces the film’s best sustained joke, since his remains continue participating in the plot for some time afterward in a manner the film treats as entirely ordinary.
McGruder is my favorite six minutes in the film. I’d have followed him for an hour, and I still think the film is smart to get rid of him before he takes over.
Uncle Les is the other late arrival and the film uses him differently. He’s a blackmailer who inherits the house, throws a party in it, and is the reason there are fifty people in a building full of corpses. That’s the engineering the finale required.
One character operating at a completely different tone gives you permission to escalate. The priest tells the audience the ceiling has been removed. The technique requires you to remove them quickly. A character who can solve the problem can’t remain in the story. Place the permission-granting scene at the midpoint. Everything before it’s one kind of film and everything after can be another, and the reader will follow. A joke that continues operating after the character is dead is the most efficient comic engine available, provided the story treats it as normal.
Twenty Minutes and Three Hundred Litres
The final sequence is a house party overrun, and the quantity of blood pumped through the set during it is the reason this film has the reputation it does. I think it’s the most joyful twenty minutes of carnage anybody has put on film.
Jackson reportedly ran a system delivering around five liters a second during the lawnmower sequence, and the floor is a slurry that the actors are physically struggling to stand in. That’s visible and unfaked.
That physicality is why it still works. This isn’t a rendering, it’s a room full of material that’s weight and behaves like liquid, and the performers are fighting the conditions. It’s also, past a certain point, no longer disgusting. The excess crosses into abstraction somewhere around the tenth minute, and what remains is a man with a lawnmower held at waist height, walking forward. That’s closer to slapstick than to horror.
The film knows this and commits to it. Lionel says he’s going to have to kill everybody, flatly, as a practical assessment of a housekeeping problem, and then does exactly that for a quarter of an hour without any change of expression.
What Jackson Did Next
He made two more small New Zealand films, then Heavenly Creatures, and then the Tolkien adaptations, and the distance between this and those is the biggest career jump in the medium.
The connective tissue is the practical effects work. The people who made this built Weta, and the same instincts about physical creatures, prosthetics and scale produced the creature work in the trilogy.
The ending is also more Jackson than most people remember. Lionel goes into his mother, literally, through a wound, and has to cut his way out. That’s a birth image so unsubtle that the film is clearly enjoying itself.
It’s the correct ending nonetheless. He’s reborn out of her, she’s destroyed, and he walks away with a woman who has seen all of it. That’s the only possible resolution for a film about a man who couldn’t leave a house. The film also flopped almost everywhere on release and was cut considerably in several territories. That’s the usual fate of work made with this much conviction and no obvious audience. Its reputation has been built entirely by people recommending it to each other. I’m glad to be one more person recommending it. Of everything Jackson made before the Tolkien films, this is the one I’d hand to a friend first.
A blunt symbolic ending is permitted if the whole work has been operating at that volume. Subtlety in the last ten minutes of a film with this much blood in it would read as cowardice. Match your resolution to your tone. Practical constraints produce technique that transfers. Everything in this film about physical creatures and scale is what its director later used on a considerably more respectable project. Excess has a threshold past which it stops being disgusting and becomes abstract, and a work can use that deliberately. Know where your threshold is and either stop before it or go well past it.
Should you watch Braindead?
Yes, and know what you’re getting. It’s an 8 because I laughed harder at this than at most comedies and winced harder than at most horror films, and because under the blood sits a sharp little film about a young man doing terrible things to avoid admitting his mother is a problem. It loses points from me for the slow zoo opening and a middle that circles. A priest who kicks arse for the Lord and a zombie baby in a park more than make up for both.
