BRAINDEAD

Wingnut films Ltd in association with the New Zealand Film Commission and Avalon/NFU Studios. A.k.a Dead Alive. Š1992. Locations: Wellington, The Pinnacles. Distributor: John Maynard Productions. Rating: R16 (Content may offend), May 1992, 35mm. Dolby Stereo. Colour. 105 mins. U.S release, 89 mins.

Director: Peter Jackson. Producer: Jim Booth, Associate producer: Jamie Selkirk. Screenplay: Stephen Sinclair, Peter Jackson, Frances Walsh from an original idea by Stephen Sinclair. Director of photography: Murray Milne. Camera operator: Mark Olsen. Editor: Jamie Selkirk. Production designer: Chris Elliott. Make-up/wigs: Debra East. Creature and gore effects: Richard Taylor. Prosthetics design: Bob McCarron. Prosthetics/make-up supervisor: Marjory Hamlin. Special effects co-ordinator: Steve Ingram. Fight choreographer/stunts: Damon DeBerry. Stunt co-ordinator/stunts: Peter Hassall. Supervising puppeteer: Ramon Aguillar. Music: performed and produced by Peter Dasent. Composers: Peter Dasent, Jane Lindsay, Fane Flaws, Stephen Hinderwell, Tony Backhouse, Arthur Wood, A. Amonau. Vocals: Kate Swading, Tony Backhouse, the Maori Battalion. Players:Fane Flaws, John O'Connor, Jonathan Zwartz, Jim Lawrie. Sound: Mike Hedges, Sam Negri, Alex Paton, Tony Johnson, Beth Tredray.

Cast

Timothy Balme (Lionel), Diana Penalver (Paquita), Elizabeth Moody (Mum), Ian Watkin (Uncle Les), Brenda Kendall (Nurse McTavish), Stuart Devenie (Father McGruder), Jed Brophy (Void), Elizabeth Brimilcombe (Zombie mum), Stephen Paps (Zombe McGruder), Murray Keane (Scroat), with Glenis Levestam, Lewis Rowe, Elizabeth Mullane, Harry Sinclair, Davina Whitehouse, Silvio Fumularo, Brian Sergent, Tina Regtien, Bill Ralston, Tony Hopkins, Tony Hiles, Duncan Smith, Tich Rowney, Stephen Andrews, Nick Ward, Peter Jackson, Jim Booth, Kenny McFadden, Angelo Robinson, Johnny Chico, Fijian rugby club, James Grant, Michelle Turner, Sam Dallimore, Anna Cahiill, Kate Jason-Smith, Frances Walsh, Norman Willerton, Robert Ericson, Morgan Rowe, Sean Hay, Vicki Walker, Chris Short, Jamie Selkirk, Brad Selkirk, Forrest J.Ackerman, Gim Bon, Sarah Davis, Anthony Donaldson, Jo Edgecombe, Mel Edgecombe, Melody French, Ken Hammon, Michael Helms, Mary O'Leary, Simon Perkins, Annie Prior, Vanessa Redmond, Chris Ryan, Tim Saywell, Paul Shannon, Belinda Todd.

Skull Island, Southwest Sumatra, 1957. Zoo official Stewart captures a rat-monkey and ignores warnings that eviil spirits will get revenge. When the monkey attacks.

Stewart, his guides dismember him and ship the animal to Wellington Zoo. There timid Lionel, a man dominated by his emasculating, cleanliness -obsessed mother, meets Spanish Paquita. At the zoo Mum, spying on Lionel and Paquita, slips on a banana skin, lunges at the rat-monkey's cage and is bitten on the arm. That night Paquita and Lionel make love in Lionel's bedroom while, in hers, Mum's health deteriorates alarm - ingly. Entertaining "society" next day, she begins to disintegrate. The party breaks up after Mr Matheson eats custard containing blood and pus from Mom's arm and Mum eats her own ear. Lionel, finding Mum devouring raw meat, promises to look after her. After eating Paquita's dog Mum dies, rising up again as a zombie. Lionel arks her in the cellar and persuades Nazi bet Heinrich to supply him with a tranquilizer, to be administered to Mum via nose injection. Matters escalate when Mum creates more zombies. Gross Uncle Les holds a party to celebrate blackmailing Lionel into handing over the house, but the zombies break out and in the ensuing blood fest Paquita and Lionel deal with the undead by liquifying them. Paquita feeds dismembered zombie parts into a blender. Lionel, aided by Paquita's grandmother's lucky talisman and having learned that his mother murdered his father, rampages with a motor mower. The last zombie to dispatch is Mum, even more grotesque than before. With the house alight in a purging fire Lionel and Paquita stroll away together.

Braindead is a brilliantly designed and executed comedy splatter, solemnly introduced by Queen Elizabeth, as in Jackson's Bad Taste. Parodic homage is paid to several films and great pleasure is shown n taking things, gross when they were conceived - the Gremlins' blender idea (the brand of Mum's blender is "Gremlin"), the picnic in Monty Python's Salad Days - and winding them up. The key joke is that 1950's New Zealand -quiet, parochial, nice - is the setting for the mayhem. Wellington trams and Kiwi Bacon van join other 1950s cultural icons, some turned to absurd use as Paquita fends of Uncle Les with a package of Rinso, Uncle Les deals to a zombie with a garden gnome, and a blender and lawn-mower symbols of domestic toil, are the implements restoring 'normality'. On the soundtrack The Archers and Aunt Daisy provide ironic commentary. Middle-class taboos around table manners, sex and bodily emissions are defied again and again with gusto.

Oedipus drives the narrative as Mum, playing on Lionel's guilt (he has suppressed childhood knowledge of his father's murder), emasculates her son. To all appearances Mum Cosgrove is a pillar of respectable, upper middle-class society, but her zombie transformation manifests the murdering sexually jealous, suffocating monster she really is Lionel for a time becomes a 'parent' and, in caring for the zombies, grows up fast. his discovery of Mum's duplicity, through finding the family skeleton in the attic, encourages him to become a man. Images of birth abound, particularly in the visceral bloodbath sequences. Lionel 'gives birth' three times to a grotesque baby and in the final scene, when Mum, a massive creature all breasts, stomach and buttocks, sucks him back into her ghastly womb,

Lionel births himself by hacking his way out with the lucky talisman. What Mum does for Motherhood gone awry, Uncle Les does for Manhood run amok.Believing himself to be a man with balls, and spending much time focused on his crotch, he can't understand why Paquita keeps kneeing him there. Paquita squeals a lot, but she's fiesty and knows what she wants.

To bring it's severed limbs, decapitated heads and decomposing bodies vividly to life, the large special effects unit used masses of maple syrup (for blood), pork fat, offal, latex, polyfoam and slime. Models make up many of the period street scenes. Humour comes in visual and verbal gags. The carnage at Uncle Les's party is the most absurd series of slapstick sequences, but, going on as long as it does, becomes repetitive. (This scene was shortened in the US version.) Performances are excellent, with Peter Jackson's cameo as a crazed undertaker's assistant a highlight.

Although not without it's detractors - The Times (13 March 1993) felt the director 'remains stuck with a schoolboy's coarse imagination' - Braindead received wide critical and popular acclaim (one reviewer called it a 'necrophiliac's wet dream'*). It was reported as one of the hottest films in the market at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.

Braindead The Musical, co-written by Stephen Sinclair and Frances Walsh concurrently with the film script, was first staged in 1995. HM

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1992 Wellington Fringe Festival: Creation of a New NZ Genre, Comedy Splatter, Peter Jackson. Rome Fantasy Film Festival, Rome: Best Actor, Best Special Effects.

International Cinema Fantastique Festival, Montreal: Grand Prix, Best Direction, Best Soundtrack.

1993 Avoriaz Film Festival: Grand Prize, Critic's Prize.

Opporto Fantastique: Best Film, Best Special Effects.

Sitges International Film Festival, Spain: Best Special Effects.

New Zealand Film and Television Awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Male Performance, Tim Balme, Best Screenplay. Best Contribution to Design (Special Effects).