ju_deadalivereview

Decapitations, dismemberings, disembowellings, vivisections, skinnings, mutilations, gallons of blood spilling all over the screen, a dog carcass pulled out of a throat, a head ripped partway off a neck, needles stabbed into eyeballs and noses, zombie sex producing a zombie baby and hordes of zombies turned into zombie mincemeat with a lawnmower.... That may sound like enough gory violence for several horror films, but it's just a partial listing of Dead Alive's extensive and excessive catalogue of carnage. Here it is at last, the zombie movie to end them all, the gorefest that outdoes all the others through pure excess, brilliance, outrageousness--and hilariousness. Wickedly funny and unbelievably gory, Dead Alive is a nonstop rollercoaster ride that will leave you limp from screaming and laughing. Imagine a George Romero zombie movie remade by Monty Python at their most outrageous and it comes out like this: the silliest, grossest, bloodiest, goriest, funniest zombie splatter horror/comedy of all time.

With the low-budget wonder Bad Taste and the tastelessly demented Meet the Feebles under his belt, New Zealand wunderkid Peter Jackson proves that he's still thirsty for more gory action and sick humour as he spins this twisted tale set in suburban New Zealand in 1957. Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme) is the shy, introverted only child of Vera (Elizabeth Moody). His father having passed away, Lionel is a devout mommy's boy until he meets Paquita Maria Sanchez (Diana Penalver), the sultry Latin lady at the local grocer's. Their love has been foretold by the tarot cards read by Paquita's grandmother, but she also foresees oppression, torment, suffering, defeat, debauchery and death, and those elements start to come into play on Lionel's first date with Paquita at the Wellington zoo. Spying on her son, Vera is bitten on the arm by the vicious, flesh-eating Sumatran Rat Monkey (a wicked claymation effect). She crushes the thing under her shoe in long, loving, disgustingly gory detail (watch as Forrest J. Ackerman takes a picture for posterity), but the damage has already been done--the next morning, she's a mess, the bite mark on her arm erupting into a hideous boil of infected pus, and her demeanour becoming more and more bizarre, offensive and violent. She eventually dies, but this is only the beginning of Lionel's problems: she becomes a hideous, hyperactive cannibal corpse, and the infection is spread to a nurse, some local thugs, the town priest (he and the nurse have sex and produce a zombie baby that wreaks havoc at a playground), and eventually a whole houseful of partyers invited by Lionel's Uncle Les (Ian Watkin). This sets the stage for the delirious final act: an all-out, nonstop, over-the-top orgy of gore that defies description. Jackson, his co-writers Frances Walsh and Stephen Sinclar, plus effects artists Richard Taylor, Bob McCann and Marjory Hamlin, outdo themselves with brilliantly executed gory set-pieces, each one a masterpiece of cinematic realization that's so wildly outrageous you'll be reeling in your seat from input overload. The last part of the film is so jam-packed with ingenious sight gags and splattery carnage that you might have to watch it two or three times to catch everything. Dead Alive is "sublime splatter transcendence," writes gorehound Chas. Balun in The Gore Score 2001, "the ne plus ultra of the gore film, not likely to be topped or even equalled in this or any other lifetime.... This, indeed, is the 2001, the Apocalypse Now, the Godfather, the Titanic of gore." (p. 84)

Jackson conjures up dynamic action sequences that assault the senses and the funnybone. Watch, for example, as Paquita smashes a chair over zombie baby Selwyn, kicking him into an ironing board, which bounces him back at her, so she whacks him in the head with a frying pan (leaving a face-shaped indentation in the steel) and pops him into a blender, getting ready to liquefy him, Gremlins-style, but his cries and wails suppress her rage long enough for him to barf green slime right in her face. Revolted, she turns on the blender, only to find that he's jumped out, hanging on to a light suspended from the ceiling, which falls out, one bit at a time, plopping him right back into the blender, which can't grind him up, so Paquita punches him in the head and he flies through a plate glass window--right into Uncle Les' crotch.

Dead Alive's machine-gun delivery of gory carnage is distinguished by the fact that it never feels monotonous or interminable (like the splatterfests of Andreas Schnaas, Olaf Ittenbach, and sometimes even Sam Raimi); Jackson keeps the viewer on edge, constantly surprising us with his inexhaustive array of bloody effects and brilliant staging, making the film feel innovative and invigorating all the way through. Murray Milne's colour-saturated photography and energetic camerawork, combined with the breakneck editing of Jamie Selkirk and up-beat, gleefully silly score by Peter Dasent, make this feel like a grisly, hilarious cartoon brilliantly brought to life.

The genius of the film belongs to Peter Jackson--he knows the horror genre and how to simultaneously pay homage to it and reinvent it. In an interview with Joe Kane in Videoscope, Jackson stated that "Dead Alive was made because I was a fan of [gore] movies. I love Re-Animator, I love the Evil Dead films. If it hadn't been for those films being made, Dead Alive probably wouldn't have existed. You don't want to do a rip-off of Evil Dead or Re-Animator. You want it to have its own identity. It's a responsibility of anybody who tackles an over-the-top gory zombie movie--you've got to look at what the gore quotient is and try to top it." (p. 420)

The gory set-piece that tops them all comes when Lionel ties a gasoline lawnmower to his chest, cranks it up and--literally--mows down scores of zombies in the living room. Blood, guts, arms, legs, torsos--everything gets thrown all over the place in wild abandon, the waves of blood drenching Lionel from head to toe. It's impossible to imagine anyone out-grossing this scene (though I'd love to see someone try). "We had two or three cameras going during some of that stuff," Jackson explained to Kane. "I think the one group of people that need the biggest congratulations are the zombie extras. They were twenty or twenty-five very brave people. We had the lawnmower--it wasn't, obviously, a real lawnmower, it was this fake fiberglass thing we had made that had these hoses that were connected to a huge pump that was in turn connected to this massive forty-four-gallon drum of fake blood that was maple syrup with food colouring. We'd sort of tested this thing with water and we'd seen the water spurting out, yet we didn't know what it was going to do to the syrup--we hadn't done it with human beings before. My only instruction really to the extras was to be as brave as they possibly could and to throw themselves against the mower till we yelled, "Cut." (ibid.)

In the hands of more "serious" goremeisters like Romero or Fulci, all this would be almost unbearably disgusting--an assault on the stomach as well as the senses. But Jackson saves it by showing us that it's all a senseless, silly ride with the carnivalesque music and hilarious antics (like Lionel turning over a picture on the wall so it won't get splashed by the blood). It's an unbridled celebration of slapstick (or "splat-schtick," as this gore-comedy subgenre has come to be called) that can't be taken seriously--you have to throw logic to the winds when you go on this wild ride. (In retrospect, it's somewhat sad to see that the inventive, anarchic edge that Jackson lavished on his early films seems to have completely died out in his subsequent work: Heavenly Creatures was a complete change-of-pace, a serious study of a true-life murder in 1950s New Zealand; The Frighteners seemed too forced to rival Dead Alive's comic excesses; even his Lord of the Rings movies strike me as the most lavish, expensive, made-for-TV films of all time--for all their technical brilliance, they seem conceived and executed with purposeful, almost solemn duty rather than wild passion. They're too by-the-book--literally and figuratively.)