Revenge of the Revenant Review 12: The one with gore measured in gallons

 

Title: Dead Alive aka Braindead aka Your Mother Ate My Dog

What Year?: 1992

Classification: Unnatural Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

We’re now at #12 in this series, and if you’ve been with me since #1, I’m sure you’re expecting something really off the wall. In fact, I was planning to give this slot to Video Dead, but I did that one first because I needed a little more time for one more that was always going to be on this list. I’ve had several movies on this list I had to go back to just to make up my mind about; this is the one I have been back to again and again without deciding what to make of it. As you can undoubtedly guess from the rating, I still have mixed feelings with this one, to the point that I very much expected this one to end up with an “unrated” ranking. With that, I present Dead Alive.

Our story begins with an expedition to Skull Island (seriously) in the year of 1957. A small band are running from a group of natives with something called a rat monkey that the natives warn to be cursed. Apparently, the members of the expedition aren’t above superstition, because when their leader takes a few superficial scratches from the creature, the others dismember and kill him (in that order). We then meet Lionel and his alternately coddling and overprotective mother. After he meets a new lady friend named Paquita, his mother spies on them during a trip to the zoo, where she is bitten by the seemingly undead rat monkey. The movie then follows her deterioration as she sickens, dies and then returns as a singularly aggressive revenant. Lionel tries to keep her contained  along with a growing number of reanimated victims, all while trying to continue his romance with Paquita. Further complications arise when his Uncle Les moves in, and promptly throws a roaring party while Lionel is trying to get the undead to stay buried. Naturally, the zombies get loose, and Lionel, Paquita and Les must fight for their lives against a growing horde. But waiting in the wings is his mother, now grown into the biggest monster of all.

Dead Alive was a relatively early film by Peter Jackson, future director of the Lord of the Rings movies as well as 2005’s King Kong. The movie was made in his native New Zealand, with a cast of homegrown talent including Timothy Guy Balme as Lionel, Cosgrove Ian Watkins as Les and Stuart Devenie as the martial arts-proficient priest Father McGruder. Spanish actress Diana Penalver was cast as Paquita, while English-born Elizabeth Moody was featured as Mrs. Cosgrove. The filmmakers reported that 300 liters (between 75 and 100 US gallons) of fake blood was used in the production, giving it the status of the goriest movie ever until the 2013 remake/ reboot of Evil Dead. The film was titled Braindead but changed to Dead Alive for US release due to a similarly titled 1990 science fiction/ horror film Brain Dead that starred Bill Pullman and the late Bill Paxton. (I might get to that one…) The film was deemed a financial failure, though its exact box office is unclear. Multiple versions were released, usually censored to varying degrees. Some foreign disc releases feature a title or subtitle Tu Madre se ha Comido a mi Perro, literally “Your Mother Ate My Dog”.

For my personal impressions, this is another movie I first watched soon after getting Netflix in  2008 or so. I had certainly heard of it before, though I don’t recall looking for it as hard as I did for some other semi-obscure zombie movies. On occasion, I have tried to work out if it was an influence on my own novel Walking Dead, but the scenes in this movie that parallel my own work (especially the giant Mrs. Cosgrove and my incarnated Tiamat) were ones I’m certain I hadn’t seen or heard of until long, long after my story was fleshed out. One more thing I can add that this is one of only two or three zombie movies with a scene I refuse to watch, and not the kind one might think.

What’s hardest to explain about this movie, and easiest to forget if you’ve seen it, is that most of the movie goes by without much happening. The first hour is like a soap opera with occasional gore and “gross out” gags (including a dining room scene alluded to above).  This includes some genuinely entertaining social satire, but far too much else that’s either vaguely awkward or comically bad. The main relief is a cemetery scene where Father Magruder shines, pummeling several of the undead with his immortal battle cry. Also of some interest are Lionel’s unaccountably successful efforts to corral the undead. These zombies do not follow the stereotype of the vicious and constantly aggressive revenant, at least not all the time. Some are merely confused and frustrated, like a graveyard punk who can’t quite figure out what to do with a spoon. Undead Magruder and a nurse are inexplicably lustful, leading to the completely inexplicable arc of a zombie baby. Even Mrs. Cosgrove herself leaves Lionel alone.

Then there is the finale, which makes the film as a whole feel like a car that goes either 10 miles per hour or 100. The violence and gore are outrageous, yet cartoonishly unrealistic. Again, this leads to plenty of good moments, but others that don’t work. I count among the former a disembodied set of organs and a zombie left incapacitated hanging from a light fixture. Among the latter are certainly the attacks of the baby. When Lionel and Les counterattack, it becomes found-object homicide, right up to Mrs. Cosgrove’s arrival. This leads to one more effective moment when undead Les enters, reduced to a head and snake-like spinal column on legs. Then the enlarged revenant enters, represented by a rig that makes the gore effects look top-notch.

For the “one scene”, however, I was always going to go with the stop-motion scene. Originally introduced as the unseen contents of an improvised crate, the rat-monkey finally appears in the scene at the zoo. Our first glimpse comes when Paquita throws an apple core to the regular monkeys in a cage. It lands on the ground, and a seemingly skeletal clawed hand snatches it up, in itself one of the finest and most unnerving stop-motion effects I have ever encounters. We then get a look at the creature, and it is a literally Hellish vision, with huge teeth, long wraith-like arms and utterly malevolent black eyes. Not content with the prize, the creature stuns a monkey that reached for the morsel right through the bars. A keeper intervenes, telling an inconsequential tale of the creature in the process. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cosgrove arrives, clearly looking for an opportunity to break up the date. It comes when the rat-monkey bites her from behind, and she gives her finest conniptions, only after decisively disposing of the rat-monkey.

In closing, all I can add is that this movie has me at a loss, which makes it fitting enough to end this list. I certainly can’t say it’s bad, nor can I recommend it as good. But if you want freaky and over-the-top, this is the one that will be featured in the textbook. With that, finally, I am done, at least for a while.