he setting is a sprawling old house in 1957 New Zealand. Lionel Cosgrove (Balme) is a quiet, repressed young man under the thumb of his tyrannical mother, Vera (Moody), who treats him as a virtual slave, barking demands while denying him any social life beyond serving her and her snooty women's-league friends.
Enter Paquita (Penalver), a sweet counter girl at the local grocery, who pines for romance and who scorns Lionel in favor of more likely candidates, until she sees an omen that pegs him as the one great love of her life. Following that star, and recognizing Lionel's shyness, she contrives a clever way to trick him into inviting her to an afternoon at the zoo.
Sneaking out of the house to join Paquita for a romantic afternoon may be Lionel's first act of rebellion, ever. Alas, Mum trails behind to spy on their new relationship, ventures too close to a cage and is bitten by the Sumatran rat-monkey, the freakish, unnatural spawn of a species created when rats deserting slave ships raped the native monkeys of an isolated island. The bite infects Mum with a virulent contagion that turns its victims into shambling, cannibalistic zombies, though she hangs on long enough to bite and infect others.
Lionel, raised by his social-climbing Mum to value middle-class appearances above all other considerations, finds himself going to extraordinary lengths to keep the growing horror a secret from Paquita and his neighbors. He's soon playing keeper to a growing collection of shambling zombies, feeding them tranquilizer-laced pudding in a vain attempt to keep them docile. He even accepts the advice of Paquita's grandmother (Davina Whitehouse), who is wise in the way of the occult, and who offers him a crescent medallion that she says will save him from the dark forces gathering all around him. But it doesn't seem to help all that much, at first, and even as his increasingly odd behavior drives Paquita into the arms of the local jock, he finds himself faced with a new threat in the form of boorish Uncle Les (Watkin), who sees all the bodies in the basement as a fine opportunity to blackmail Lionel out of his inheritance and home.
The final disaster looms when Uncle Les throws a wild party to celebrate his newfound wealth. Paquita shows up to investigate what's going on with Lionel, Uncle Les tries to force his unwanted attentions upon her, and zombies set loose by a critical miscalculation run amok, quickly infecting most of the guests. The house becomes an abattoir as the stage is set for an epically bloody three-way battle between the young lovers, the villainous Uncle Les and the unstoppable forms of the living dead.
A slapstick orgy of blood
When Peter Jackson accepted his Academy Award for Return of the King, he wryly thanked the academy for not calling attention to his early films Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles. The low-budget cult favorites that initiated his career have their admirers, but they're clearly immature works that show their low-rent origins. His bloodily slapstick horror comedy Dead Alive, which has been called the goriest film ever made, and which may well deserve that epithet, was a different phenomenon entirely. Though definitely not for all tastes (with audiences both attracted and repelled by zombie horror already knowing whether they belonged to its intended market demographic), it struck many viewers and critics of the time as the product of creators destined for bigger and better things.
Bloody zombie films had been made before, of course, with George Romero being the acknowledged father of the genre. Dead Alive is nothing if not bloody; its full version has been banned in Germany, among other places. But there's a sensibility here that goes well beyond the film's wild inventiveness at gross-out gags. For instance, in one early scene between Paquita and Lionel, she deliberately exaggerates her difficulties with English to prompt a correction, and trick him into asking her on a date. It's a sweet and charming scene that engages audience sympathies immediately—but the surprising thing, the almost incredible thing, is that the love story remains sweet and even innocent long after the foyer floor is ankle-deep in gut juice. It turns Dead Alive into one of those rare action-oriented films, and rarer horror films, where the connection formed between hero and heroine is not just a formula element dispensed with as schematically as possible, but a genuine story driver that continues to give the film heart until the very last frame.
There's more: the antics of a malevolent baby spawned when two zombies fall in love, and the frenetic scene that ensues when Lionel, still gamely trying to do the right thing, takes it to the park in a stroller; an elaborate sequence involving a houseful of zombies placated with pudding; the moment when the unctuous Father McGruder (Devenie) wades into a zombie assault with the memorable declaration, "I kick ass for the Lord!"; the moment when Lionel pauses, just before using deadly force, to turn a portrait of the queen toward the wall so she won't have to watch. There's even the bravura grossness of the moment when a lawnmower is used to turn the tide of battle. It may be low comedy, but it's inventive low comedy, and it never lets up. The final all-out battle, trapping less than a handful of survivors in a house overrun by the living dead, is a kinetic tour de force, ringing an incredible number of variations on the basic concept and showing the talent for kinetic fight sequences that, shall we say, served the writers and director admirably in well-known subsequent projects. (As for the final confrontation with Mum, it bodes well for their upcoming remake of King Kong.)
Folks who saw the talent at play here were vindicated by the Walsh/Jackson screenplay, and Jackson direction, of their very next project, the much more mature Heavenly Creatures, a fantasy-tinged treatment of a fact-based New Zealand murder case. The movie was not a hit, but it was powerful, and served as further evidence that these people had serious potential. (The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.) But it's difficult to fathom anybody, even their most ardent fans, forseeing the scale of the triumph awaiting the filmmakers less than a decade away.
