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What’s the goriest movie you’ve ever seen? Well take that movie and triple it, and maybe you’ll come close to the glorious gorefest that is Peter Jackson’s 1993 “splatstick” epic, Dead Alive (or Braindead, if you live outside the United States)! A masterpiece of flying bodily fluids, Dead Alive could be the one true successor to the visceral insanity of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead series. Not bad for a low budget effort out of New Zealand!
Overprotective mother Vera Cosgrove (Elizabeth Moody), spying on her grown son, Lionel (Timothy Balme), as he visits the zoo with the lovely Paquita (Diana Peñalver), is accidentally bitten by the fearsome Sumatran rat-monkey. When the bite turns his beloved mother into a zombie, Lionel tries to keep her locked safely in the basement, but her repeated escapes turn most of the neighbors into the walking dead, who then crash a high-society party thrown by Lionel’s boorish Uncle Les (Ian Watkin).
Join Clay and Amanda as they get into the ins and outs of too much mother love, cranial degloving, zombie sex, zombie childbirth, kung fu priests, lawn maintenance tools-as-anti undead personnel devices, chicken monster un-birth, and whether or not it’s important Clay know what year the movie takes place!
Before Peter Jackson spent fifteen years in Middle Earth becoming the king of the box office, he was a low budget filmmaker in New Zealand with a punk rock attitude and a mind to gross out even the most hardened horror aficionado! While it might not have the budget and scope of his later films, Dead Alive definitely shows Jackson’s eye for the epic, and is a masterpiece of blood, guts, and humor, unrivaled save for the most out-there films from Japan. Join us in kicking ass for the lord on this episode of The Rotten Horror Picture Show!