Day Twenty-Four: Braindead (1992)
I miss Peter Jackson from the early days, the unhinged horror comedy filmmaker who hadn’t yet conquered the world with a certain fantasy trilogy. I am quite fond of Lord of the Rings, but King Kong lost me somewhere in the two hours it takes for Kong to show up, and I wondered what happened to the Jackson who would’ve had a baby eating a person’s head in half that running time. I miss Jackson’s indulgences of the NC-17 variety.
Bad Taste is impressive primarily from a wannabe filmmaker standpoint. You respect how much Jackson does with so little but the movie, by movie standards, leaves you wanting. Meet the Feebles is foul and gloriously deranged. Braindead, though, is Jackson’s doctorate in the genre, it’s no wonder he left “splatstick” after this one. I’m not sure what else there would be left to do. Zombie sex? Check. Pus mistaken for custard? Check. Climactic set piece requiring a football field’s worth of plastic body parts? Check. Baby zombies? Check. Baby zombies ripping heads apart? Check. I know I already wrote that one, but “baby ripping heads” or “baby eating heads” are surprisingly fun phrases to type, they make the coffee go down that much easier.
The gory cartoonish horror comedy is harder to pull off than it may sometimes appear. The danger (I feel I wrote this somewhere before, my apologies) is that the comedy and the horror moot one another and yield just another exercise in filmmaker attitude that doesn’t make it as a real movie. Braindead works so well because it’s devoid of any attitude to begin with. Braindead isn’t chic, isn’t hip, isn’t cool, its the bubbly collective of Jackson’s daydreams while watching every possible monster movie he could get his hands on. Jackson is a wit and a talent, and he recognizes both the absurdity and the essentiality of these fantasies. The viewpoints of “absurd” and “essential” bounce off one another like billard balls in Braindead and yields what could be called a junior Buster Keaton cover of the zombie movie.
The zombies that Lionel (Timothy Balme) has to nursemaid throughout the movie are not that much worse than taking care of the human version of his mum (Elizabeth Moody), whom he has a conflicted, Norman Bateish relationship with. Jackson shoots the human scenes the same way he does the carnage that eventually ensues: in jarring, three ring circus style close up. The sound effects that accompany human Mum’s actions are also stylized and digusting. Lionel handles the zombies so well because he’s had experience with the vaguely living dead, and this isn’t that much of a stretch.
The madness that Jackson orchestrates toward the end of Braindead has to be seen to be believed, but part of me wishes that the film played in the “having to shield zombie Mum from society” sandbox a little longer. There is one truly uproarious scene in this vein: a dinner sequence with Lionel, Mum and a couple they need to impress. I won’t ruin the various grotesqueries that Jackson unleashes, but the obviousness of Mum’s condition, and Lionel and the couple’s determined obliviousness, is inspired. Part of my (mild) regret stems from Moody’s performance, she’s too good to be so quickly discarded in favor of a plastic zombie.
For all its violence, Braindead is surprisingly square and dorky, lovable even. Whatever your taste, Jackson’s passion is too damn pure to dislike. There’s a romance here, and it’s naive in a very old school silent movie way. Jackson’s playful indulgences are still evident in his more recent films, but he’s polished now, put on his tux so to speak. The little rugrat genius who throws mud at your windows and dreams of different ways to blow up a corpse occassionally returns in fits and starts (the T-Rex/Kong three way for instance) but he’s in disturbingly short supply these days .
October 24th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Perhaps you didn’t get the memo Chuck, Peter Jackson is a crime against humanity. Jeff Wells said so.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:51 am
That’s what I hear, I wish I had read that before I posted so I wouldn’t look so silly.