Braindead

Film (Trailer) – 1992

R16

Restricted

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After his mother gets infected by a bite from a deadly Sumatran rat monkey, Lionel (Almighty Johnson Tim Balme, in an award-winning performance) has to contend with a plague of the living dead while attempting to woo the love of his life. Peter Jackson had already been tagged with the title ‘The Sultan of Splatter’ after his first two features, but this was the film that confirmed it. Armed with a decent budget, he takes a Flymo to fusty 1950s New Zealand and takes cinematic gore to a whole new extreme in the process.

From the first scene — a funky parody of Raiders of the Lost Ark — Dead Alive is stylistically a comedy, with hilarious slapstick performances, most notably from the very talented (Tim) Balme....If there's any justice, this one should play forever in midnight screenings. Great stuff.
– Reviewer Andy Klein in The Los Angeles Reader, 16 July 1993