Braindead

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1992

Braindead
Peter Jackson
New Zealand, 1992, 101 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: WingNut Films Limited
Producer: Jim Booth
Screenplay: Peter Jackson, Stephen Sinclair, Frances Walsh, from an original story idea by Stephen Sinclair
Cinematography: Murray Milne
Editor Jamie Selkirk
Designer: Kenneth Leonard-Jones
Creature and Gore Effects: Richard Taylor
Prosthetics Design: Bob McCarron
Sound: Mike Hedges, Sam Negri
Music: Peter Dasent
Principal Cast: Timothy Balme, Diana Penalver, Elizabeth Moody, lan Walkin, Brenda Kendall, Stuart Devenie, Jed Brophy

“Restrained” is not a word often used to describe the art of New Zealand’s Peter Jackson. For that matter, neither is “dull,” or “squeamish.” From the deeply gross Bad Taste to his muppet massacre masterpiece Meet the Feebles, Jackson has established himself as splatter gore’s most inventive, outrageous and thoroughly entertaining representative. In Braindead, the Jackson œuvre only gets better, with a sharper wit and an assured, expansive visual palette (albeit with a preponderance of red). But, rest assured, the guts still fly, the heads still roll, the sores never stop oozing and love, sweet love, triumphs in the end (with the help of a bone-grinding lawnmower).

The birds of passion this time are Lionel, town loser, and Paquita, his Spanish enamorada. They meet surreptitiously at the local zoo, only to be followed by Lionel’s overbearing matron of a mother. But, when she backs up against the cage of the Sumatran Rat-Monkey, the snoop gets her comeuppance. The grotesque mammal (created with groovy cybotronics) gnaws her arm, until mom turns its head into mashed turnip. At home, the puncture wound swells and then explodes with a spray of pus. Before you can say “bloody carnage,” mom is a zombie eater of raw flesh and a terrible embarrassment. Lionel tries his best to keep her under control, but—oops!—she finds Nurse McTavish and Father McGruder and converts them to her groovy kind of cannibalism. They screw (as much as zombies, flesh dripping from their bodies, can) and instantly produce offspring: Selwyn, Satan child. Each new visitor to the house comes into their clutches until most of the town has monkey's venom coarsing through their veins. Only Lionel and Paquita, with help from a convenient electrical socket and a sharpened lawnmower blade, can save the day. Jackson's marvelous satire of uptight fifties New Zealand life is overwhelmed only by the best delivery of the gory goods since Evil Dead II. A triumph.
—Noah Cowan