Braindead
There are a small minority of films that are good and Braindead is certainly one of them.
Wow!! See it!! And sucked in for missing it on the big screen. I cannot rave enough about the genius of Peter Jackson. I think Braindead might just be Great. I think it’s quite possibly the greatest black comedy of all time. (Either that or one of the other PJ movies is.) Certainly the greatest splatter comedy of all time. I was puking and laughing all at once… well not quite, but laughing my arse off continuously for a sustained period, and it’s been a long time since a film has made me do that. Mostly slapstick humour of course involving blood, guts, pussules, but with some great one-liners too. The whole cinema was in hysterics, but then the effects go just that little bit over the edge, and the laughter suddenly stops........ and it’s just this cathartic feeling of “uuuuh”. Follows the philosophy “always leave them wanting less”.
There are more immortal scenes of genius than you can poke a stick at, scenes “of course! why didn’t someone else already think of that!” I want to see it again and again and again.
Brief synopsis: The hero’s domineering, possessive mother gets bitten by a Rat-Monkey, turns into a zombie, and as zombies tend to do, turns a couple of other people into zombies. But the son doesn’t have the heart to bring an end to this plague — that would mean killing his mother; so he keeps all the infectees secretly locked in the basement. But of course this can’t go on forever; and things eventually come to a grisly, hilarious head. Oh and there’s a rather charming love-story in there as well.
Braindead is a horror movie, a love story, a comedy, a Freudian fable. Peter Jackson is one of those directors that deliberately avoids stereotypes and clichés. And when he does use clichés, he embraces them wholeheartedly, larger-than-life, he caricatures them. E.g. the domineering mother is certainly larger than life in Braindead. In Bad Taste, the Victim is a (male) tax-collector. Not the type normally seen as in-need-of-rescue.
I have a feeling that Jackson took comic horror to its limit with this. Its zenith. So even he has stopped making this sort of stuff now..he’s got nowhere left to go. Though he will have some pretty cool monsters lined up for LOTR I’m sure.
Matt
