I have no idea how much damage watching Peter Jackson's Bad Taste did to my brain when I watched it as an impressionable child; It was the best thing ever for a long time, overshadowing even this when it came out a bunch of years later. I've watched both a lot of times over the years and while I'll always love Bad Taste, now it's Braindead that consistently blows me away. Every single time.
It mixes the then-burgeoning splatterpunk movement with slapstick - Splatstick, if you will, which is actually a thing, according to the internet. It's juvenile, over-the-top, full of actors going full ham and the broadest of broad and gross-out humour. It is glorious.
The film's silly sense of humour is on full display right out of the gate, with a (on the uncut version) patriotic homage to the queen as an expedition of the New Zealand zoological society goes to Skull Island to pick up a rare rat-monkey, a species that's later explained to be the result of a horde of plague-rats raping the local monkey population. It's a busy chase scene that finds time for a cricket gag and ends with a hilarious amputation joke. Zingaya indeed.
From there the action moves to Wellington for some light farce between Lionel (Timothy Balme), his domineering mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody), and Paquita (Diana Peñalver), a local shopkeeper. Paquita falls madly in love with Lionel because (in one of the film's weakest conceits) she's basically predestined to. Lionel is definitely interested, but Vera immediately dislikes the girl and forbids the affair (she hilariously describes Paquita as experienced; Moody is so good in her role).
You can't stop young love, but Vera is nothing if not persistent. While they're on a date in the zoo she follows them and gets bitten by the rat-monkey. Dear old mother mines this for maximum drama, and uses it as an excuse to pull Lionel and Paquita apart - after crushing the rat-monkey's skull with her high heels in a scene that strives to be as disgustingly goopy as possible. Bonus: the scene also includes a cameo from sci-fi legend Forrest J Ackerman.
As foreshadowed by the prologue, the rat-monkey carries a deadly illness that quickly starts turning Vera into an undead monstrosity; And as she turns, the film's ghoulish sense of humour starts ramping up to overdrive.
Lionel keeps her from running amok by keeping her zonked out with animal tranquilizers, but errors are made and undead abominations proliferate. His containment efforts finally fail spectacularly at a party held in his house, which results in an awe-inspiring final battle against a horde of the undead.
This is an incredibly well-crafted, imaginative movie. Not just the gore and creature effects, which are a staggering feat of low-budget wizardry, but the script (by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair) is incredibly elaborate, introducing a lot of elements that then keep weaving in and out of the action.
Jackson's direction would get sharper with time, but many of the gonzo camera moves he would later use in his later, much more polished movies -particularly dramatic pans and zooms- can be traced back here. It's slightly amateurish, especially when compared to his simpatico American colleague Raimi, but it's incredibly energetic and propulsive. And the visual storytelling is top-notch, always keeping the many plates it's spinning on-screen, ready to be deployed for maximum impact.
Much as I love the Lord of the Rings movies, I mourn early Jackson and wish he would have found a way to temper his more mainstream instincts with these deeply goofy, overtly bloody offerings. Put me against the wall, and I'd choose this over the whole of that much more famous trilogy.
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