This is the seventh post in the 90 from the 90s series, exploring underrated flicks from the great movie decade. To be eligible for this series, movies must have been released January 1, 1990 – December 31, 1999, and earned less than $20 million at the U.S. box office.
After his overbearing mother is bit by a Sumatran rat monkey, Lionel (Timothy Balme) struggles to keep his romantic life afloat—and the undead from overtaking his home.
Initial Reception
Made on a budget of $3 million, 1992’s Dead Alive (originally titled Braindead in New Zealand) made less than $250,000 at the U.S. box office. But buzz began to build (in his Entertainment Weekly review, Owen Gliberman praised it as “the most delirious bloodbath since Re-Animator”) and the film became a cult hit on video.
Key Moment
The film’s gory grand finale featuring a party full of zombies and a lawnmower.
Killer Line
“You’ve got… the bite!”
Standout Player
The makeup and effects teams. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie with more blood, gore, and bizarre creatures. While the first half doles out enough oozing, spewing body destruction for your average horror movie, the second half goes full throttle with severed parts, rivers of blood, and flesh-ripping zombie mayhem. Whatever these people got paid, it wasn’t close to enough.
Achilles’ Heal
I don’t think anyone is clamoring to see more of the love story between Lionel or Paquita (Diana Peñalver). But it’s not a movie killer, and it does help feed the story.
Why This Movie Still Matters
When I was in high school, I took a public speaking class. For our final grade, we each had to give a speech using the techniques we learned throughout the semester. One of those techniques was to kick off your speech with an attention grabber.
My speech was on violence in film. So for my attention grabber I cut together a three-minute video featuring violent cinematic images. I included snippets from movies like Taxi Driver, Clockwork Orange, Faces of Death, Re-Animator, Blue Velvet, and, for the final clip, Dead Alive.
It was the perfect end note—just that glimpse of the blood and carnage in Dead Alive was enough to peel everyone’s eyeballs open. But it was really only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the widely creative, over-the-top gore the movie has to offer.
Here are 10 things you’ll see in Dead Alive you won’t see in many other movies:
Human custard consumption: After being bitten by a rat monkey while spying on her son at the zoo, Lionel’s mother, Vera, begins to decompose. But that doesn’t stop her from hosting a formal luncheon with the president of the Wellington Women’s League and her husband. With Vera gasping and shaking, her wound bursts shooting blood and puss into the husband’s custard. Then her ear falls off into her own custard. Both take big bites—to the horror and disgust of the Women’s League president.
A literally unhinged nurse: After a nurse tells Lionel his mother is dead, he starts weeping. She consoles him. Suddenly his dead mother pops her head up and jabs her hands into the nurses cheeks, moving her fingers around inside her face. Then she pulls the nurse’s head back, snapping it from her neck so it’s just dangling by a hinge of skin while blood spurts out the top.
Zombie mouth to mouth: Later, the nurse zombie and a priest zombie make out voraciously. Lionel tries to pull them apart but when he does the nurse zombie tears off all the skin around the priest zombie’s mouth. Then she chews up and swallows the skin.
An unexpected face off: Two zombies attack a man with glasses at a party. One grabs him by the collar and throws him to the floor. The other comes up from behind him and yanks him backward by the hair, slipping all the skin straight off his head (complete with glasses) like a blanched tomato to reveal the bloody, bug-eyed skull beneath.
A legless escape: A man tries to get into Lionel’s house for safety. He climbs through a window, but something grabs him. He screams for help. Two women grab his arms (each taking one) and try to pull him in. They get him in but his legs have been stripped of all flesh. They are just bloody bones (though he still has his boots on).
Regurgitating some punch: One of the women screams while staring at the man with the bloody bone legs (see #5). A zombie comes up behind her and punches his hand though the back of her head and out of her mouth.
A gut-wrenching performance: Lionel kicks a zombie trying to get in through a hole in the bathroom door. Its stomach is impaled on the splintered wood. The zombie continues pushing forward until it splits in half, its guts falling out onto the floor as it crawls. It jumps on Lionel and its guts drop out of its severed backside… Later, those same guts become its own zombified creature, chasing after Lionel using its intestines like arms to grab him.
Playing half-head soccer: A zombie gets hedge clippers rammed into its mouth. The hedge clippers are opened and closed repeatedly until the top half of its head falls off. The head piece then gets punted away… Later the same half-head gets kicked around on a slippery bloody floor. After the half-head attacks Paquita, she puts it in a blender and turns it into a bloody milkshake.
A Gallagher-esque spinal twirl: A zombie appears with its spinal cord and head protruding from its body like a giraffe. When it tries to attack Paquita, she rips the spine off the body, spins it around like a lasso, and smashes the head on the counter like a watermelon with a splash of flesh and blood.
An open-face birth: A woman who’s been bit by a zombie is in distress. Her neck starts bubbling. Then two little arms pop out the sides of her neck. They proceed to rip her face open at the center, revealing a tiny laughing baby face.
You can see clips from some of those scenes here:
Quick Takes
Originally titled Braindead when it was released in New Zealand and Europe, the movie was renamed Dead Alive for its U.S. release because there was another film with a similar name released around this time (the decent 1990 mess-with-your-mind flick Brain Dead, starring Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman). Maybe it’s because it’s the title I initially knew the film by, but I think Dead Alive is the better title.
Before he became a blockbuster, Oscar-winning filmmaker, Peter Jackson showed his ingenuity by making truly subversive, attention-getting low-budget horror films. From 1987 to 1992, he made: Bad Taste, about aliens using people for their fast-food chain; Meet the Feebles, an all-puppet movie that can best be described as The Muppets go to hell; and Dead Alive. After Dead Alive, he inched closer to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking with Heavenly Creatures (starring a very young Kate Winslet) and The Frighteners (starring Michael J. Fox) before getting the greenlight on The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Dead Alive is frequently recognized as one of the bloodiest movies of all time. It reportedly used nearly 80 gallons of fake blood for the lawnmower scene alone. The other movie commonly mentioned in the same bloody ballpark (in terms of volume of fake blood used) is 2013’s Evil Dead directed by Fede Álvarez.
“Total... bodily... dismemberment!"