"Your mother ate my dog!!!"

"Well, not ALL of it!"

Dead Alive, aka Braindead

     When part of your back story is about a rat/monkey hybrid whose whole existence is due to hot, dirty rat-on-monkey action, you've got to wonder what's in New Zealands water.

     Poor Lionel has an overbearing mother from hell that tries to control every aspect of his life. When a nice local girl is convinced through a tartott reading that Lionel is her dreamboat, they go for a date and immediately hit it off. Sadly, his mother isn't content with Lionel's happiness, and begins spying on them while at a zoo. While sneaking around the monkey cages, she's bitten by the rat/monkey thing mentioned earlier and it infects her with some funky virus that turns her into a flesh eating zombie. From there on, it's some sick and twisted hijinks when several other people are inadvertently zombified and poor Lionel becomes a corpse-master, keeping them all in the basement. I gather he's never heard of a wood chipper. Through all of this, his dirtball uncle shows up and blackmails him out of his 'deceased' mother's house and throws a huge party where everyone is having a ball...till the zombies get loose. Then things get nasty...

"Great day for a mow!"

...and I mean NASTY! This was actually gorier than any of the messed up Japanese films I spent all of last week watching. There was more decapitation, more blood showers, more wince-worthy scenes than anything I've ever encountered in all the years I've watched films. It was oozy, bloody, chunky, messy, drippy, and above all else, FUCKED UP!!! Until you've seen a man swallowed whole by his giant zombie mothers womb and then follow that up with a bloody menstrual expulsion from said womb....or being chased around an attic by a set of sentient and fully intact intestines, you've never seen gore.

"Yep, looks like we're done here. Spot of tea?"

    And the best part? It's not really low budget. The actors were great, the F/X was tops considering this is from the non-CGI era, and the direction was spot on. And why wouldn't it be? It was partially writen and directed by Peter Jackson. Yeah, that guy made some messed up movies before any of the Lord of the Ring films were even a screen play. One thing I suggest is if you seek out this movie, make sure it's the 97 minute feature, and not the heavily censored and sanitized 85 minute version. If you watch that one, you'll have no idea what I'm talking about.

Tuesday: That's really deep, man....