Dead Alive is an easy movie to dismiss. It features non-stop humor, most of it over the top and too camp-y to believe. But its approach to the humor is similar to Reanimator; It doesn’t try to be cute in its attitude and give you a lot of knowing winks. This is
one of many signs of the still-developing, but enormous talent of
its director, Peter Jackson, later to direct Heavenly Creatures, then the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The basic story seems simple, but there’s more going on than you notice at first. Lionel, one of the two main characters, will probably strike you as the ultimate mama’s boy, a complete nerd.
Owing to that, you expect him to react in some horrible way to a different woman. That another woman will treat him well, then pay the price. Several times in the story you expect him to snap completely. Anthony Perkins all over again.
The charm of this movie is watching how differently things work out. You are primed for this moment where he loses it, where we get the real Lionel; he is off on the serial-killer express.
It doesn’t turn out this way. The other main character, Paquita, senses the good in Lionel. She is not the woman you think she is: a good-hearted but hopelessly naïve person; not able to see how damaged the guy is, until it’s too late. Paquita may not be book smart but she is brave, loyal, and has learned a lot from the folk-wisdom her family gave her.
To be fair, Lionel is no Norman Bates either. Again and again, he tries his best to be kind to his mother, Vera. She is unable to return kindness to anyone, though.
All she knows is selfishness and a desperate desire to keep
up appearances. Things fall apart when mother is bitten by a
rare monster-monkey while she visits the zoo. Instead of heading off to the ER, she calls a nurse to treat the wound. Big mistake. The toxins from the monkey will soon kill her and turn her into a zombie.
Lionel’s mother–bitten
Dead Alive will no doubt be fun for people who enjoy its many tributes to earlier movies. Most of us enjoy that. What you may miss though, is a strange sort of back-and- forth between Vera, in a feverish delirium with her festering wound, and her fantasy about Lionel and Paquita having sex. Vera’s infected wound, swelling and pulsing, is contrasted to the increasingly hot sex; the wound finally bursting and spitting out liquid like some foul ejaculation. Except for David Cronenberg’s movies I can’t remember ever seeing sex associated with a festering wound before.
You get a hilarious dinner scene, complete with obnoxious, boring conversation, while suddenly Vera’s ear falls into custard dessert. Then Vera is dead from her infection.
Remember Norman Bates cleaning up after his mother?
Lionel seems headed in the same direction. He seems
more concerned with getting the blood off the floor than in his
mother’s death. But Paquita doesn’t just stand there watching. She suddenly remembers her grandmother’s prophecy about the man she, Paquita, loves—”Dark forces are amassing against him.“ She is still unable to help him right away. But you get the feeling that she will do more, later on.
Sometimes, you can watch a movie, and find yourself asking, for example, “What if this character had made the opposite decision 15 minutes ago?” or “How would this scene look if this movie was a heavy drama instead of a light comedy?”
Questions like these went through my mind, about this point in Dead Alive—so many of the situations reminded me of Psycho. Lionel, like Norman Bates, is clearly trying to do the right thing. He does not want to reveal his mother’s death and tries to hide all traces of her.
But “doing the right thing” works out better for Lionel than for Norman Bates. You don’t expect this mama’s boy to do what Norman could not—ask for outside help and get it. Lionel moves away from the bad mother’s spell, and reaches out to Paquita (and her grandmother) for help against the “dark forces.” And she helps him by giving him an amulet which will save him over and over again.
Paquita–always there for Lionel through all the horror
No doubt about it, Lionel does need plenty of help. In no time, he has a whole houseful of zombies to take care of. Besides his mother he soon has her nurse, the minister, a monster baby (inspired partly by It’s Alive and by Baby Herman from Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and a gang of thugs he met while digging up his mother’s body. He feels that all of them are his responsibility to care for, and he does all he can. Yet he is also trying to escape his Joan of Arc martyr tendencies. He wants more from life than just a second dysfunctional family. When his sleazy uncle shows up and wants the house, Lionel says he can have it. And he means it too.
Monster baby
Dead Alive finds outrageous humor in these plot twists and turns. Much of the humor is camp-y. Check out Lionel’s armor as he enters the basement to tranquilize his mother. And the overhead light swinging crazily, as it did in the Psycho basement when Lila (Vera Miles) finally learns Mrs. Bates’ secret.
Lionel needs to tranquilize his zombie-mother just to keep her quiet at her own funeral. Mother and son wind up in a bizarre embrace during the service. Lionel can’t even dig up his mother’s body without aggravation. He is surrounded by thugs who taunt him. Ironically, his mother shows up to save him (a brief but effective tribute to the original Carrie). This lucky break permits
him to bring her back to the basement, the first of many other
zombies to hang out there.
Meanwhile, his uncle has invited a whole bunch of his friends over to party. The worst kind of rowdy trash. You get a bad feeling you’re going to see a train wreck where the party people run smack into the zombies. The situation is not so different from the wind-up in the original Dawn of the Dead, one of the most violent movies ever at the time it was released (1979.)
Peter Jackson deserves a lot of credit for dealing with this nonstop splatter with a surprisingly light touch. Making it
disgusting without any real viciousness is a task that somehow he manages.
Dead Alive is one of the goriest, over-the-top movies you will ever see. But it is also fun (and not just for real sickies). And it could be most affecting for anyone who has ever had a crush on someone, but was held back by a dysfunctional family of origin and their own shyness.
This may sound hard to believe but take my word for
it. This is a true original.