Scarred by Cinema : Dead Alive

by Eutychus

I have a friend whose taste in movies, let's face facts, leaves a lot to be desired. He is continually pressing tapes into my hands claiming that I was about to watch the absolute best that Hollywood had to offer. To put it in perspective, he raved over Battlefield Earth. Normally I just take the tapes and put them at the bottom of my ever-increasing tape stack hoping that he'll forget about it the next time we meet. Sometimes it works; there are days when he's pressed me to watch one movie and by the time we see each other again his attention will have been diverted to the next cinematic "masterwork." More often than not, though, he'll want details on what I thought about it and it gets more and more difficult to bluff my way through it.

About two years ago, he pressed a videotape in my hands and almost screamed "You have got to see this! This has got to be the most bizarre, gruesome thing you have ever seen."

The question comes to mind ... why do I do this to myself? Or, why do I allow him to do it to me?

I imagine there is a small amount of self-punishment involved. As I mentioned in my first column, however, there is also the idea that now I want to be able to redeem my reactions to the trailer I saw for Berserk back when I was a kid. There is also a small aspect of testing myself. I had a friend who was into the public BDSM scene and one of the reasons she gave for doing it was that she wanted to find out where her limits were; where the edge was; how far she could go.

The film was titled Dead Alive. It goes pretty much all the way.

The plot is fairly straightforward and is your standard "flesh-eating zombies on a rampage" creepshow. Animal collectors find a rare Sumatran rat monkey whose bite is not only deadly, but turns one into a zombie. Why anyone would want to put one of these into a zoo in an open-air cage is anyone's guess, but this type of movie doesn't necessarily need to conform to anyone's sense of public safety. And of course, the monkey manages to scratch a woman, who proceeds to infect everyone she meets.

The woman who is bitten is the mother of a sweetly played nebbish named Lionel (played by Timothy Balme) who can't bear to not take care of what he sees as his responsibilities; eventually he ends up taking care of four zombies in his basement. The house, however, is taken over by partygoers. The zombies escape. Carnage ensues.

I cannot go overboard in telling you exactly how graphic the carnage gets in this movie. The people who made Friday the 13th? Pikers. The producers of Nightmare on Elm Street? Sheer amateurs. You know you're in the hands of someone who is going to take things to a whole new level when you have a credit given to someone for "gore effects." It would not be giving too much away if I reveal that in the penultimate climax to the film, Lionel gets his revenge and cleans house with a lawnmower.

I could compare this movie to another that brought the gruesomeness level to a whole new pinnacle: John Carpenter's The Thing. But the comparison would be unfair since Carpenter's vision was not carnage for carnage's sake. In The Thing, the carnage is usually comparatively brief and serves the plot well at every point. In Dead Alive, it seems to be a competition to see how much more over-the-top each scene can get over the last.

But there are also parts of it that are hilariously funny. It's difficult to tell sometimes if you’re laughing more out of a protective reaction to the grossness of the scenes or if they are truly funny. There is one scene were Lionel is attempting to feed custard to one zombie whose head has been almost completely severed; he’s unable to, because the custard keeps leaking out of her neck. It's gruesome, but it's also funny watching Lionel actually try to deal with things that he has absolutely no control over.

It may not be one of those films that you can watch in one sitting. I couldn't the first time I watched it. I had to watch one sequence and give my mind time to digest it before I could let myself go on to the next. And once having seen the whole thing, it was a few years before I could go back to it. But you eventually become hardened to the extremely graphic violence and you can actually read the film for the deeper Oedipal levels it develops.

The irony of the film is that it was made by Peter Jackson, who later went on to make one of the most visually stunning movies in recent time (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.) Dead Alive was one of his earliest films, made when he was a relatively unknown director from New Zealand. If you view the films one after another, it's an amazing jump.