Braindead (1992)
Directed by Peter Jackson
When a Sumatran rat-monkey bites Lionel Cosgrove's mother, she's transformed into a zombie and begins killing (and transforming) the entire town while Lionel races to keep things under control.
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5 films that influenced Braindead
What critics say influenced Braindead
At about this point, were we watching a Lucio Fulci film, City of the Living Dead for instance, we might conclude "and now all hell breaks loose…" with complete confidence.
After Lionel�s mum is bitten at the zoo by a Sumatran rat-monkey, family life becomes Night of the Living Dead.
Prior to this, Stuart Gordons Re-Animator (1985) was considered the absolute ultimate gory movie, with its much-vaunted 50 gallons of fake blood.
It makes something like "Re-Animator" seem like a UNESCO documentary about Mother Teresa.
Over in Wellington, New Zealand, young Lionel (Timothy Balme) has female troubles, torn between the under-my-thumb influence of overbearing Mum (Elizabeth Moody), poster girl of the prim-and-proper school, with all the hypocrisy that entails, and his instant attraction to exotic Paquita Maria Sanchez (Diana Penalver), the down-market daughter of a local grocer, whose grandmother is the type of fortunetelling old Gypsy woman you'd find in just about any version of The Wolf Man.
Inventive to a fault when it comes to image and incident, betraying an antic and anarchic gusto that calls to mind Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II, Jackson's film is an escalating series of nauseating set pieces (little can rival the revolting "pus in the custard" scene), culminating in hands down the goriest sequence ever committed to celluloid, as Jackson and his FX team shift into maximum overdrive for a marathon of mutilation and mayhem guaranteed to test your intestinal fortitude.
Ash may lose limbs as he chainsaws his way through the installment, but Evil Dead 2 holds together as the giddiest treatment of viscera this side of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.
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Braindead is the magnum opus of Peter Jackson’s early career, retaining the stop-motion and bloodletting of Bad Taste and the puppetry and slapstick sexual exploits of Meet the Feebles.
Peter Jackson 's zombiefest follow-up to Bad Taste, set in suburbia in the late '50s, is 'a slapstick comedy with blood and guts instead of custard pies'.
If you’ve seen Dead Alive (1992), you’ll have an idea of what Bad Taste is like—assuming you bear in mind that this splattery horror/comedy was made on weekends (over a period of several years) for very little money.
And as gory as it is, it's still nothing compared to Jackson's Dead Alive.