Braindead (1992)

Tagline: “There’s something nasty in Lionel’s cellar…his family!”
UK Running Time: 104 minutes

Film Quality: 4.5/5
Gore Content: 5/5
Entertainment Value: 4.5/5
Originality: 3/5

Introduction

Up and coming horror director Peter Jackson raised the bar when it came to splatter comedies with his debut feature ‘Bad Taste’. Following it up with a sex comedy involving giant muppets he returned to the splatter genre with the sole intention of outdoing himself, suffice to say he succeeded. What he created was a gross out gore comedy that is by far and away the bloodiest film ever committed to celluloid which amplifies every single visual gag from his first film and turns the on screen offal all the way up to eleven!

In a nutshell

When Lionel’s overbearing mother is bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey she quickly turns into a flesh eating zombie, infecting anyone else she attacks. Enlisting the help of his star crossed lover they must battle the undead, unhelpful family members and, somehow, protect his mother to try and keep all of this a secret and prevent a mass zombie epidemic.

So what’s good about it?

The only place you can start with this is the gore…it is SO over the top that at times you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing. It’s impossible to list all of the moments in Jackson’s gore epic but it can be summed up by one scene, the infamous lawnmower massacre (left). What was Peter Jackson thinking!!!??? The best part of five minutes solid, filled purely with zombies being pureed by an upturned lawnmower, intercut with a scene in another room where two women shove still twitching body parts (including half a head) into a blender. Blood and guts literally fly everywhere…I genuinely don’t think I’ve witnessed, before or since, such a sustained onslaught of extreme splatter. It’s audacious enough in its conception, let alone filmed with such relish…simply unbelievable!

Whilst Jackson really went for it in the gore stakes, he also piles on the laughs. There are clear efforts to top ‘Bad Taste’, for example Derek’s attempts to keep his brains in his head draw parallels with the nurse who can’t keep her head the right way up, the lawnmower massacre references the chainsaw skirmish, the dinner scene with the custard tries to out-gross the bowl of chuck and he repeats his ‘born again’ trick. But there are some great lines as well including Lionel’s reaction to Paquita’s horror that his mother has eaten her dog (“not all of it!”) or the kung-fu reverend (“I kick arse for the Lord”). Some very good visual gags as well including the zombie with a gnome where his severed head should be and some intestines preening itself in the mirror.

Visual nod to 'The Thing' anyone?

Jackson gets in some nerdy movie nods as well, mostly in the direction of Monty Python. The reverend is right out of a Python sketch, there is a direct reference to the black knight scene and more than enough slapstick humour and surreal visuals to have made the Pythons proud. There is a very clear reference to ‘The Thing’ with Uncle Les’ zombie, his head and spinal cord sitting atop of the rest of his body. There’s a ribcage removal that brings ‘Dawn of the Dead’ to mind, in fact much of the flesh eating must be a nod to Romero’s cult flick in the sense that it’s all done with a comic book sensibility.

What surprised me most is that there is a genuine attempt to bring some character, emotion and mythology into the film with the subplot involving Lionel’s mother’s deep and dark secret and Lionel’s implied childhood trauma. The characterisation involving Lionel and Paquita (left) as destiny is a little clichéd but works surprisingly well thanks to our sympathy for Lionel and the way Timothy Balme plays the character as an awkward outcast. In amongst all of the gore, ears in custard and zombie sex, there’s something quite sweet in the central love story that just gives the film a little bit of heart. I’m not normally one for unnecessary romances in horror films but it does lift this film above your average splatter film, underpinning the mayhem with a bit of humanity.

Finally we have Jackson’s direction. Watching it back you can see some of the shots that ended up in the Rings trilogy, the quick and twisty zooms, the maniacal close ups and the odd sweeping pan. It was obvious to anyone who saw this and ‘Bad Taste’ (perhaps not so much ‘Meet the Feebles’) that Jackson was going places. This film cost just $3million and, though the gore effects have dated a little and you can see some of the cracks, all of the effects are practical. The vision and inventiveness is all there on the screen. More grandiose things were to follow with a shot at a more serious film, ‘Heavenly Creatures’, before the bigger budgets and a return to the horror-comedy genre with ‘The Frighteners’ in 1996.

And what about the bad?

Despite its wild visuals, insane levels of gore, high entertainment value and belly laughs, somehow it doesn’t satisfy in the same way that ‘Bad Taste’ did. I can’t quite put my finger on why, perhaps ‘Bad Taste’ was such a labour of love that Jackson’s personality came through just that little bit more than it does in ‘Braindead’.

On the genuinely bad side, the low budget does show at times, especially during a couple of truly cringe worthy shots of trams that make Brio sets look convincing and the cotton wool hanging in the sky during the opening plane scene. Some of the acting is decidedly suspect, particularly when involving accents, but you can get away with that to a certain extent thanks to the campy nature of the film and its comedic tendencies.

Any themes?

There’s a hell of a lot of disturbing subtext involving motherhood. Lionel’s mother can’t let go of her son, in a quite literal sense at the end where she says “Nobody will ever love you like your mother” before forcing him back inside her gaping insides before he’s ‘born again’. She spends the entire film trying to stop him from leaving her, from sabotaging his blossoming relationship with Paquita to wheezing out “Don’t let them take me away” shortly before succumbing to the bite. He’s spent a lifetime under the thumb and she just can’t let him go.

The film owes a lot to the old tradition of Grand Guignol theatre which frequently featured graphic and violent images from the early 20th century through to the 60s. So graphic and realistic were the effects on occasion that audience members would be physically sick or become unnerved that some of the atrocities taking place on stage were actually real. Horror was the most popular form of Grand Guignol and considered extremely violent for the time but were followed by comedies to counter the effects of the horror. It’s not such a leap of logic that today’s ultra-gory horror comedies sprang from the same philosophy, up the gore and up the laughs to be able to stomach the content.

Release history

I still find it incredible that this film has never suffered any censorship problems in the UK and has only ever been available in uncut form, even when shown on TV several times. In fact, in recently released notes from the BBFC, it appears that they gave serious consideration to a ‘15’ rating because it’s so over the top that it simply can’t be taken seriously in terms of causing harm to the viewer. The only reason they didn’t was that it might set a dangerous precedent for classifying gory films for younger viewers.

It didn’t fare so well in other countries, versions of the film are still banned in Germany and Finland and heavily cut in a number of other countries including the US unrated version and Swedish release. There has yet to be a decent DVD or blu-ray release and is only available as an anamorphic release in the German ‘Peter Jackson Collection’. Jackson has stated that it his intention to remaster the films himself so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Cultural Impact

This gorefest gave Peter Jackson a springboard towards bigger budget films and was the last in what you might call his splatter period. It showed that he had the talent to work with a slightly bigger budget and that increased further with his first ‘serious’ picture, ‘Heavenly Creatures’ which followed in 1994.

I would dearly love to see the reaction of those who first discovered Peter Jackson through his, admittedly quite brilliant, ‘Lord of the Rings’ film. The thought of them hunting out his previous films and pressing play on this only to be confronted by one of the most demented splatterfests ever to grace a video player!

‘Braindead’ has been cited by Simon Pegg as a major inspiration for his own cult comedy ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and is referenced in the scene where Shaun removes the bandage on his mother’s arm.

Final Thoughts…

It may be a little comedic for some gorehounds’ tastes but you can’t deny the extreme nature of the content and the almost unparalleled levels of bloodshed on display. I don’t think he would have got away with half of the stuff that is thrown at the screen had it not been done with tongue firmly planted in cheek and it is a fairly unique brand of humour on display. You can see some of the shots and directorial flourishes from this film appear again in his later, bigger budget movies and it’s obviously a personal film…but hurry up and give us a decent release, please!

Memorable Quote

Paquita: “Your mother ate my dog.”
Lionel (holding up the tail): “Not all of it…”

Priest: “Step aside boy, this calls for some divine intervention…I kick arse for the Lord.”

Uncle Les: “I understand Lionel…some things a fella prefers to do alone.”

Lionel: “That’s my mother you’re pissing on.”

You’ll like this if you enjoyed…

‘Bad Taste’, ‘Re-Animator’. ‘Evil Dead 2’, ‘Return of the Living Dead’