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
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 or their own
shyness.
This may sound hard to believe but take my word for
it. This is a true original.