REVIEW: Dead Alive

It’s been about a good 5 or so years since I seen Dead Alive. I had recently seen Jackson’s Bad Taste about a year ago but I decided to watch his more infamous zombie movie instead. Let’s just say this: I forgot how over-the-top this movie was and I drastically underestimated the gore… surprisingly. The movie is about an animal known as the Rat Monkey who bites our protagonist’s (Lionel) mother at the zoo. Well, she dies and then gets brought back to life only to infect others that come near her. What happens after this is indescribable because it’s just so goofy and out there that I wouldn’t know how to put this into words. Even as I type this out it’s hard to say exactly what I thought of this movie.

I maintain the fact that this movie is sort of like a satire or a parody of the zombie subgenre. It seems like Jackson wanted to make a ridiculous movie that was more comedy than horror and he knew this was just for fun but I think that he indirectly made a movie that would slap the whole zombie culture in the face. We all know that zombie movies are extremely gory (evidenced by Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) but here the gore is taken to the extreme. There is ooze, pus, blood and yellow goopy slime spurting out from these zombies that it becomes nauseating to look at and this was all done intentional. The excessive gore in Dead Alive is parodying the use of blood and guts in serious zombie movies… it’s rather genius. If I am not mistaken, the famous lawnmower scene has gone on record as being the goriest scene in movie history or at least one of the goriest scenes in movie history.

Speaking of gore that has to be one of the movie’s strong points. I was taken aback when I saw this for the first time and again when I revisited the movie. For an independent movie, the effects and the zombie makeup is pretty cool. There are limbs falling off, heads exploding, skin peeling off, giant swollen-breasted zombie mothers and great artwork… all if it has been handled with care and it’s worth gawking at. Don’t go in thinking that the acting is good or the story is going to blow you away, this is a movie where you just have to watch how the zombies get killed and marvel at the effects.

One thing that I noticed about Jackson’s horror movies is his camerawork or should I say his cameraman’s camerawork. His technique is pretty creative because he uses a lot of close ups and canted angles and you can tell after he branched away from his cheesy movies of the 80s and early 90s, he incorporated some of these angles in The Frighteners. This was also something that I really enjoyed about Dead Alive; the close ups really grasp the grotesque nature of the film. You see, in detail, the bubbly blood and the rotting flesh of the mother’s ear in the custard. In the scene when the guy eats the custard with the severed ear in it… Jackson zooms in on him swallowing the ear and it’s just so disgusting that you get the shivers. It’s a great use of cameras and it really puts the audience right there in the moment. The canted and crooked camera angles add to the cartoony surreal atmosphere of the film, so I think that there is a lot more meaning behind the camera angles that people care to see.

Even after all those years this movie still holds up and I am still mesmerized by the gore and the violence in this movie. I can’t really explain how the violence and the human mutilation play out because it is so over-the-top that words cannot express it. Even in this age of computers and CGI and vastly superior zombie movies, Dead Alive still can hold the test of time and it’s still enjoyable to watch over and over again. I might be one of the handfuls of people that see this a zombie parody but there is a method to the madness. The only way to find is to give this movie a try. I strongly urge it if you haven’t already seen it.

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