Dir. Peter Jackson
The tone of the film is perfectly
set up before the film actually starts. There's an image of the New Zealand flag.
An image of a young
Queen Elizabeth II
on a horse in regal clothes. It suits the ridiculous tone of the film and
explains so much about why
Braindead
became as it is. It's not just because it's still one of the goriest films ever
made and so over-the-top in its content. It's because it still does this while
being so jovial. So quaint. British idiosyncrasies twisted around and rebuilt
through a new viewpoint of a former British colony. That throughout it, for all
the bizarre dismemberment, it feels so middle class in tone, which makes it
funnier. Set in fifties New Zealand, Lionel (
Timothy Balme) is a likable young man who has the potential for
eternal happiness when the young Spanish woman who works at the nearby grocer's,
Paquita (
Diana Peñalver), takes
immense interest in him romantically and pulls him out of his shell, the
predictions of her grandmother through tarot cards about literal eternal
happiness making her adamant about sparking the relationship. Unfortunately
Lionel's sole surviving relative in his close family, his mother (Elizabeth
Moody), is domineering and controlling
of him, wishing him to be there for her beck and call, and certainly she's not
happy when his attention is directed to Paquita. This situation is made worse
when Mum is accidentally bitten by the newest exhibit at the zoo, the
horrifying (but, brilliantly, stop motion) Sumatran rat-monkey. Shown in the
pre-credits to be acquired by the zoo through gruesome cost, the rat-monkey's
bite causes a victim to decay will still alive, die and become a member of the
living dead with the ability to survive even being hacked to pieces. The
zombification of Mum forces Lionel to become a social outcast, breaking Paquita's
heart in the process and pushing her away, as he is stuck with his sleazy uncle
(
Ian Watkin) swooping it to try and
acquire all the wealth his late sister had, and a basement of ever increasing
numbers of zombies. As zombie cinema has taught us, infections can spread quite
quickly and Lionel already has a few undead occupants, without rent needing to
be paid, in his house without potential ones being created through the party
his uncle wants to start.
The fifties setting is immediately
ingenious. The absurdity of such events taking place in a socially well-to-do,
humble pie era of New Zealand, moral and refined, makes this splatter comedy
and the gruel that takes place funnier. The film takes advantage of the
idiosyncratic absurdities of this, and like Bad Taste (1987), plays up its country of origin's culture for
humour as well. And it's a splatter comedy with a capital S. What you get in Braindead is the closest thing to
carnivalesque in terms of this kind of splatter cinema outside of something of Re Animator (1985). Instead of hierarchy
behind turned upside down as in a carnival, the human body is turned upside
down in its function and form here. Gunge from an open orifice should not be
eaten in custard but is. Legs should not be able to walk by themselves without
the torso but a pair do. Intestines can preen at themselves in the bathroom
mirror despite having no mind to function for themselves let alone eyes to
actually look at themselves. If a severed limb can be used in a comedic way, it
will. What is seen in Braindead is
foul and twisted, but it's played with in such a comedic deadpan tone that it elicits
giggles as well as shock. That it plays with such a serious tone that is yet so
easy to find amusing - the use of a radio play within the film for audio
related humour shows more of what Jackson
clearly wanted the film to be like - makes it better.
It also helps that this was when,
frankly, Peter Jackson's films has
the most of his personality. Some of the jokes in this final film in his
splattick trilogy are just as childish and tasteless as in Bad Taste and Meet The
Feebles (1989), such as what is clearly a former Nazi turned drug pushing veterinarian,
but he was never pretentious, never sophomoric, and has such an imagination
that, alongside friends and other individuals who made these films with him,
brought such surprising things to be seen you never though you would see. Say I
was spoilt, but Braindead was one of
the first of cult horror films I saw when I was eighteen or slightly younger
and started searching for them, but most other horror films haven't topped what
this film did still. It's not just that the final quarter is the goriest, ridiculous and jaw dropping things I've seen still,
including the infamous lawnmower massacre, but that it never lagged before
then, as ridiculous in the first three halves, and that it was able to keeping
topping what happened earlier on for something even better. You cannot say,
even if you say the film's simplistic, that the end peters out or it was a drag
to get to the famous end scenes. It makes the romance between Lionel and Paquita
legitimately dramatic, and uses the oedipal plot with Lionel's Mum to top
everything before the actual climax. I thought, even on another viewing, that
it would be impossible to top sequences that left so much fake blood soaked
into the set floors that it was still there when everything was cleaned up and
other productions were being filmed on it. Somehow Braindead manages to top this with the end of the Oedipal plotline
that will leave your jaw on the floor further. The carnivalesque body horror
and complete sacrilege displayed with how the body should work and be treated
continually goes further and further, managing to not run out of steam halfway
through because, like a Looney Tunes
cartoon, it is playful and willing to be as surreal even for cheap jokes. Even
the repeating kicking in the testicles of the Uncle character, for a cheap
overused joke, is still funny on the third time because the set-up for how they
happen is as much of the joke too.
There is very much the sense that
Jackson couldn't really go further
than this. Braindead succeeds
majestically, but he made two tasteless and creative films before this and, on
the third swing, learnt enough to create a homerun in terms of the final
creation. I'll admit this could go against my complete frozen attitude to the
more acclaimed Jackson of now, but I
am willing to explore the films I've yet to see that have no involvement with J. R. R. Tolkien whatsoever. The thing
is, Jackson didn't necessarily need
to drop the adolescent but imaginative tone of those early splatter works
regardless if he did need to move on. A different tone of horror film could
have been enough, but keep his willingness to improvise. Why I may have nearly
fallen asleep in rewatching The
Fellowship of the Ring (2001) is that Jackson
was choosing material, to his detriment, that forced him to have to be as
faithful to the original source as possible and not allowed to be the prankster
he clearly was with his first films. And frankly, while I will give them a try,
hasn't he been making films for the last decade that was adapted from other
peoples' work instead of his own ideas? It makes one disappointed that his id
has been straight jacketed into being respectable. His first film Bad Taste felt far more like a creation
of passion in its ramshackle lunacy and its creativity. Braindead is that film made with more craft and more skill, and I
continue to feel resistant about viewing his newer films, even if interest is
still there, because it feels like he may have lost the point.
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