But as has happened numerous times before, I forgot to check YouTube. And there it was.
I am not sure how strenuously the lawyers are protecting the copyright of things like Dead Alive. But I wonder if its total absence from everywhere else means that it is somehow in the public domain -- though that would make me think I'd find it everywhere rather than nowhere.
In any case, I did finally harpoon my white whale for October, the movie I felt was most likely to fulfill exactly what I'm going for by watching horror comedies this month.
That assumption could not have been more correct.
Before I get into the discussion of the film proper, I do want to discuss its title. As I was watching and the title Dead Alive flashed up on the screen, I felt certain that this was confirmation of its "true" title. Just now when I checked on Wikipedia, I realized that this was never the proper basis for any confirmation, because it depended on whether an American version was uploaded to YouTube or a Kiwi version. In New Zealand (and presumably everywhere else other than North America), this film is called Braindead, so that's undoubtedly how Jackson thinks of it. Logically, I should do the same.
Why am I not? I guess because it is a movie I have been at least distantly aware of since it first came out, when I was still living in America for another 20 years, and when every reference to it would have been as Dead Alive. It's like how I will always list Natalie Portman's film debut as The Professional even though I know it was called Leon in the director's home country of France. To be clear, if an Australian film were released today and given a new name for the U.S. market, I'd certainly go with the Australian name, because I would have encountered that first. I don't think there can be a hard and fast rule on this, so you just have to go with your gut on a case-by-case basis. And part of it is that I just like the title Dead Alive better.
However, to honor Jackson, I will also include a Braindead poster, then will forever afterward use the title Dead Alive.
Dead Alive starts out fairly tamely, although I should acknowledge that a man's hand and arm do get cut off in the opening scene. The more fascinating thing about this opening scene, if we are considering Jackson's entire career, is that it takes place on Skull Island -- you know, the home of King Kong. Given that this was still deep within Jackson's DIY phase, and only his third feature overall, it's hard to imagine his expensive and lavish King Kong remake was only 13 years off -- not to mention that he'd be making his first Lord of the Rings only nine years later (and starting on it well before that).
The central affliction in Dead Alive is passed by bites, and indeed a crew from New Zealand is bringing back a rare monkey from this island (not the oversized one who is its most famous occupant) to house in a zoo in Wellington. It's an ugly little bastard called a rat monkey. I didn't get this from the movie itself -- maybe I didn't hear it properly as I was still adjusting to the Kiwi accents -- but Wikipedia tells me that this creature was spawned from "the rape of tree monkeys by plague-carrying rats." I have some questions about the biological logistics of this but let's move on.
Anyway, this awful monkey -- the first great practical effects creature we are introduced to -- is given to grabbing and tearing off the appendages of monkeys in neighboring cages, an activity you'd think would be enough to get him isolated a safe distance from all other creatures if not entirely put down. He gets a bite into the arm of the domineering mother of our main character, Lionel (Timothy Balme), a neurotic man whose father was killed in a drowning incident when he was young. Lionel is in love with a Spanish Romani shopkeeper's daughter, Paquita (Diana Penalver), despite the objections of his smother mother.
It isn't long before she gets sick, before flaps of her skin begin peeling off and before she loses an ear into the soup she's eating one day at lunch. No worries, she just catatonically eats it again, spitting out the pearl earring.
What follows is an increasingly hilarious spreading of a zombie plague that includes all sorts of partial and complete decapitations, exposures of rib cages, vomiting up of guts, sprays of green goo, popping of eyeballs, severing of limbs, extracting of teeth with pliers, halvings of bodies, and funniest of all, a scene of a priest karate kicking a half dozen zombies all around a church cemetery.
This is just an absolute gore-soaked, viscera-laden joy. The labor of love that is evident in every single frame of Dead Alive makes this, understandably, a favorite of horror fans everywhere. Coming 11 years after Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, this movie pays loving homage to the mother of all horror comedies at every turn. (Well, at least Evil Dead II was clearly defined as horror comedy.) I mention this only because I am hard-wired as a critic to make explicit connections between movies when I write my reviews. Dead Alive is its own thing and only owes its zany, raucous spirt to what Raimi and others put in motion. (Raimi, of course, has his own debts to George Romero.)
I just looked them up, and Raimi is only two years older than Jackson. What a wee little pup Raimi was when he got started. It seems likely that the title Dead Alive was chosen specifically in the U.S. market to remind us of both Romero and Raimi, and if that's the case and it brought more eyeballs to see the eyeballs that pop out of their sockets in Dead Alive, then all the better.
One thing I love about it, that you don't get from those other two franchises, is the Kiwi sense of humor that courses through this movie. Although I think the scenario would be funny as presented in any language or with any cultural origins, there's something about the New Zealand line deliveries and these characters in general that makes it all the more so. Just imagine Taiki Waitit's sense of humor in a full-on zombie movie and you'll get what I'm talking about. (In fact, I reckon What We Do in the Shadows is kind of his own version of this.)
And the gore -- oh the gore! It's delightful. I don't think I'm one to giving audible reactions to the films I'm watching, but I couldn't get through Dead Alive without laughing and making vocal grimaces ("Ugh! Ohhh! My God!") at the places Jackson gleefully goes in this film.
Lastly I should mention the one fully practical "human" character in the film, which is a zombie baby that was the result of the posthumous sexual relationship of a zombie nurse and a zombie priest. This is pretty much the movie's signature character, so if you see a single image from Dead Alive it's likely to involve this guy:
I think this might be the evil twin of Kuato in Total Recall.
Dead Alive is the kind of movie where if I knew you'd seen the movie, I'd double the length of this post and keep saying "Remember the part where ________? That was awesome." With credit to Chris Farley.
But since I don't know if you've seen it -- and since I know you can find it on YouTube -- maybe I'll leave it to you to make these wonderfully gruesome discoveries yourself.
I'm afraid it may be all downhill from here in terms of horror comedy, but I've got one more full weekend to try to top Dead Alive before I probably settle in for some more conventional scares leading up to Halloween.
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