Aye, aye, it's been two months! Well now that Halloween's upon us I'm going to cover one of my favourite films of the 90's and one that would have definitely gotten done anyway:
Braindead (1992)
Synopsis
Peter Jackson trumps Pegg and Wright by doing a Rom-com with zombies over a decade before Shaun Of The Dead. Lovable loser Lionel falls for shopgirl Paquita but his overbearing socialite mother is having none of it. Then she gets bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey and all hell breaks loose. It's officially the goriest film ever by volume of fake blood used.
Review
Those who thought Peter Jackson was a bad choice for the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy may have watched Braindead before making that decision. In fact they could have seen any of his early movies, but the first three, this and the two previous Bad Taste and Meet The Feebles, will have brought them to the same conclusion. I'd have loved to have been in the room with the Tolkien fanatic who decided to check these out to see who this upstart New Zealand director was and if he was fit for the task of interpreting this blokes equivalent of a sacred text.
Braindead, for lack of a better word, is mental. Jackson had already shown his intense sense of humour and love of gross-out gore in Bad Taste and Meet The Feebles, but the third by him trumps them with such incredible gusto that it's difficult to actually stomach at times. A friend of mines had to turn it off after about half an hour. The thing is that's the movie at its tamest. sure there's the custard scene, the bit with the dog, a neat solution to the problem of getting bitten and a zoo keeper with a bad sense of tact. What probably finished him was the bit with the nurse's face. But that's nothing on one of the most notorious scenes from any splatter movie, one that was heavily edited in America when Braindead was originally released, as Dead/Alive thanks to another movie with the name. It is of course the lawnmower scene:
That's one hell of a set of blades on that thing! My lawnmower packs it in if you hit a patch of moss. Of course it's not just the level of gore in this scene, and the rest of the movie, that makes it. It's the ideas. Jackson has played with the convention of the zombie movie hero with his chainsaw in a way that fits into the film perfectly. It's quirky in that way non-American takes on these types of films tend to be. Why else would the central plot really be a pretty typical romantic comedy? And the supporting cast of characters are great, the main attraction being the Nazi war criminal vet, but the Kung Fu vicar comes close. Then there's Uncle Les a sick fuck you're glad gets killed, but at the same time appears to be the only one able to actually take on the plague. Of course it's his party that creates it. Another great twist in Braindead is that instead of the plague of zombies laying siege to the family home they are already in it thanks to Les' shindig.
The fact that the threat for Lionel is in the family home is central to Braindead's theme. It's really a film about family, or rather about the point when it's time to fly the nest. Lionel's mother is horribly overbearing but in Paquita he is presented with his escape. Of course Mum has to go and become a zombie and infect a few others forcing Lionel to make what appears to be the pretty bad decision to set up another, this time very dysfunctional, family in the basement. It's like he's actually not ready to give up his family, even when Mum dies and so creates a new family unit when surely it would have been easier just to kill the zombies. Of course he may also be creating the family he didn't have thanks to his Father's. Then there's his "grandchild", the zombie baby, the answer to the question "but what if zombies give into our other base instinct, to mate?". The scene where Lionel takes it for a walk is straight out of slapstick, except you won't see many old films where the hero punches the kid in the face. Again, why does he take it out? Eventually Lionel naturally is forced into the decision to give up on the family home but in a truly demented ending has to literally escape the womb.
Braindead isn't a scary film. It's really a comedy, but like Tremors it has some brilliantly constructed set pieces. As for the gore it is insane but actually gets to be so much that it just becomes hilarious. By the lawnmower scene you are almost numb to it after witnessing the myriad deaths, I won't ruin them for you, but how they managed to pull this off on the pretty small budget is a miracle. Then there are the different zombies, from the one who ends up with a gnome for a head to the one who ends up as three, his top half, his legs and his innards that dropped out the former which form into a creature by using his sphincter for a face. As I said, you wish you could have seen what the Tolkien enthusiast's face looked like taking this in, but as I pointed out it really is an incredible achievement given the budget and so actually does hold great significance into how Jackson pulled off his famed trilogy. They'll be the films that he is remembered for, but Braindead may well be his actual masterpiece.
Top 100 Where And Why?
Braindead goes in at number 1 at this point.
1. Braindead
2. Hudsucker Proxy
3. Grosse Pointe Blank
4. Cube
5. Galaxy Quest
6. White Men Can't Jump
Over to John and his list!
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