Dead Alive

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Director Peter Jackson's second feature cheerfully trumps the gross-out quotient of his splatterfest debut, the appropriately named Bad Taste. The tone is cartoonishly comic, and the premise is simple: The village dweeb (Timothy Balme) is trying to maintain a budding romance with the sweet Paquita (Diana Penalver) while concealing the fact that his overbearing mum (Elizabeth Moody, in an amazing good-sport performance) is a flesh-eating zombie. (She owes her condition to a bite from a "Sumatran Rat Monkey" at the local zoo.) Complicating matters even further is Les, a greedy uncle (Ian Watkin), who suspects that his sister has died and is eager to occupy her elegantly furnished Victorian mansion. The climax is a housewarming party Les throws to celebrate his "inheritance;" what he really gets is his comeuppance, thanks to his sister and her similarly afflicted zombie pals, who burst out of their basement prison to turn the guests into appetizers. Our hero finally cuts a wide swath through the zombie party crashers with the help of a rotary blade lawn mower, leaving the house awash in blood and body parts in order to save his romance. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 (Alternate Wide Screen)
• Audio: PCM Stereo
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: French, English, Spanish
• Features:
  • • [None specified]

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Peter Jackson

• Producer:

  James Booth, Jim Booth

• Screenwriter:

  Peter Jackson, Frances Walsh

• Screen Story:

  Stephen Sinclair

• Screenwriter:

  Stephen Sinclair

• Composer (Music Score):

  Peter Dasent

• Editor:

  Jamie Selkirk

• Associate Producer:

  Jamie Selkirk

• Costume Designer:

  Chris Elliot

• Casting:

  Frances Walsh

REVIEW:

• If a gorier movie than Dead Alive has been made, it's hard to imagine it. On the other hand, if a funnier horror film than Dead Alive has been made, only a few candidates would qualify. (Return of the Living Dead would be one.) Peter Jackson and his collaborators have no constraints about piling up one outrageous sight gag involving body parts and gruesome dispatchings after another, and even if this kind of comedy isn't for all tastes, it does provide a smorgasboard of laughs for those who love their humor dark and exaggerated. Like the great animator Tex Avery, Jackson has a wicked eye for gags that stretch our conception of what bodies can do. He also understands that simply killing zombies with a shot to the head -- as in the grandfather of modern zombie horror films, Night of the Living Dead -- is elegantly simple, but pretty boring, too. Kitchen appliances and household tools figure heavily in the slaughterhouse of a party that is the raison d'etre of the film, but it's the power lawnmower finale which reduces everyone to a mere blade of grass in the lawn of life. Jackson realized that he had gone as far as he could with this genre and his next film, Heavenly Creatures, was a well-crafted psychological thriller which retained his eye for arresting visuals. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi