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Review: Braindead (Dead-Alive)
Posted on Wednesday, June 25 @ 23:36:20 CDT by admin |
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This
is Peter Jackson’s third feature length movie. It is a story of
Lionel, a young man living in New Zealand that is coping with his new
found love, and the loss of his overbearing mother. It is called
"Braindead" everywhere except the United States, where it
is known as "Dead Alive", and is 19 minutes shorter. That's
right, they had to cut part of the movie out to tone it down for its
release in the US. There is no nudity as a reason for this, just
gore.
The
movie starts on Skull Island, where an unnamed zoologist and his
apprentice are running from the island’s native people. Obviously
the native people have no respect for Zoologists, even when they have
their paperwork in order. The two are carrying a small cage
containing a Sumatran Rat Monkey, a creature that allegedly came to be
after giant rats from slave ships made it to the island, and raped
the tree monkeys. They narrowly make it to their jeep after being
chased by the natives are throwing spears at them. The apprentice
kill the zoologist after seeing he was bitten by the creature.
 The Sumatran Rat Monkey. I doubt they make good house pets.
Lionel
is a man in his mid twenties, and lives with his overbearing mother,
his father having drowned trying to save him when he was young. A
local shopgirl (Paquita), through a tarot card reading, believes he
is her one and only true love and pursues him, aggressively. Lionel’s
mother (Mum), as all overbearing mothers do, does not approve of
Paquita. The couple does manage to go on a date to the zoo, but Mum
is on their tail. The couple witness the Rat-Monkey kill and
dismember another monkey at the zoo, before sitting down to rest.
Mum, whilst spying on them, gets bit by the rat-monkey, which
apparently starts a zombie-infection scenario. Cool, eh?
As
Mum gets sick, Lionel tries to get her prepared for a lunch with a
couple from a prestigious social club (The “Wellington Ladies
Welfare League”, or “WLWL” for short). The difficulty in this
is that her skin is falling off, as are various other parts of her,
which inadvertently wind up in the food they were having for lunch.
As she gets more and more sick, she eats an entire dog, and bites her
nurse, infecting her with the zombie virus. Lionel, having taken care
of his mother for so many years, is without anyone to be responsible
for, thus, he starts taking care of Mum and the Nurse, them being
zombies now. He has also learned that animal tranquilizers work to
make the zombies appear dead, but only temporarily. He injects Mum so
they can have her funeral without people knowing she is not entirely
dead. Lionel is later assaulted by some punks in the cemetery where she was buried while digging her up to
give her more tranquilizers. She rises from her grave and kills the
three punks, who immediately turn into zombies themselves. Those
zombies go after Lionel, who is then saved by Father McGruder, the
local priest, who happens to be a kung-fu expert. Yea, zombies
getting their butts kicked, kung-fu style, by a Priest. Father McGruder is bitten,
and is himself a zombie shortly thereafter.
 Father McGruder, He kicks ass, but not for just anyone.
Later,
at home, Lionel is trying to take care of Mum, the Nurse, and Father
McGruder, all zombies, when Mum’s brother Uncle Les shows up,
looking for an inheritance. Lionel narrowly avoids having Uncle Les
find out about the zombies, but in the meantime, Father McGruder and
the Nurse are doing the nasty: Yes, a zombified Catholic Priest and a
nurse procreate, and the result is a zombie baby. Ain't blasphemy
great? Once the zombie baby is born, Lionel tries his hand at
parenting and takes the little spawn of evil to the park, where he
attracts all kinds of attention and creates all kinds of havoc. When
he returns home, he finds out that Uncle Les has found out about the
zombies, but thinks they are just dead bodies. He blackmails Lionel
into giving him his entire inheritance, including the house, in
exchange for Uncle Les not telling the police. Uncle Les makes him
bury the “bodies”, and then throws a party, and the zombies,
including the three that were left in the cemetery, show up and start
tearing the place up and killing all the guests, who in turn, become
zombies themselves. All hell breaks loose when Lionel realizes that
what he used to subdue the zombies he buried was not a tranquilizer,
but rather a STIMULANT. By that time, the house is full of zombies
and everyone not infected is in survival mode. Zombies are fighting,
and getting broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, which are
also fighting. Lionel finally shows up with his lawnmower, and
literally mows a path through them. As the couple, the only two
remaining, uninfected people try to escape, a HUGE entity, obviously
a super version of Mum, shows up and tries to stop them. Lionel then
reveals some suppressed memories: His mother KILLED his father after
catching him having an affair, and made up the story about him dying
while saving Lionel in order to instill guilt into him. He confronts
her regarding this, and She "swallows" Lionel up directly
back into her womb, and tries to kill Paquita. Lionel cuts himself
out of her stomach with a powerful medallion Paquita had given to
him. When she falls into the burning, collapsing house, the blood
soaked couple make their final getaway.  Zombie Baby, precocious little guy, isn't he?
All
in all, this movie is really a love story at it's base. A bloody,
disgusting, over the top gory love story. What makes it different
from most other zombie movies, is that instead of trying to get rid
of the zombies, Lionel is trying to take care of them. It is by far
the goriest movie I've ever seen, Jackson used 300 liters of fake
blood and over 100 fake dismembered body parts just in the final
scene.
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