Dead Alive
The film that announced Peter Jackson to the world as a filmmaker to be reckoned with, while not quite the work of sheer manic genius that Meet The Feebles was, is still an hilarious, and extemely gory opus of bad taste. The film suffers from the fact that it takes awhile to really get going, with much of the first 30 to 40 minutes occupied with a romantic subplot that doesn’t really work. Once it kicks in, with the entrance of the Uncle Les character and the climatic party, it’s all you can do to buckle down and enjoy the ride, if you have a strong stomach. One outrageous gore effect follows another, and the viewer is left in awe at how Jackson could do so much given the budget he had. In addition, there is a nice twist at the end involving the main character’s mother that helps to tie everything up nicely. As for the acting, Timothy Balme is nearly a standout as the nerdy hero Lionel, and the film makes good use of irony as others regard his behavior as perverse while in reality he’s just trying to make the best of the zombies that have invaded his life, making for some good laughs (two of the zombies in his basement have sex and a zombie baby is born, what does he do? Put it in a stroller and take it to the park, haha). Ian Watkin is a riot as the crass Uncle Les, stealing nearly every scene he’s in. The kung fu priest is a nice out of left field touch (“I kick arse for the Lord.”) The big drawback though, is with the female lead, as her perfomance seems to alternate between being confused and acting retarded. This, along with the generic horror movie score and the strange need to set the film in the 1950s, keep this from approaching the brilliance of Evil Dead, but in the end, a wonder of low-budget horror filmmaking and arguably the single goriest film in the history of cinema…
8/10