Films: 1990s
(1992) Dead Alive
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Dead Alive
Director: Peter Jackson
Release: 1992
That is not to say "Dead Alive" hasn't its own pleasures, nor is it to say that Jackson doesn't work with at least one solid underlying theme. It's just to say that the film's parts are individually worth more than its whole.
And parts it has. Parts litter the sets. Gallons and gallons of syrupy red goop soak every available surface. Plot is all but non-existent. A ridiculous prologue shuttles something referred to as a Sumatran rat-monkey from Skull Island (presumably a tip of the hat to "King Kong") to Australia, where it is kept in a cage at the zoo until it bites the hand of Oedipal matriarch Mum (Elizabeth Moody).
Jackson unspools "Dead Alive" at a grindingly slow pace until the resurrected corpse of doltish Lionel Cosgrove's (Timothy Balme) monkey-chomped mother lurches to life. From there, every manner of foul body fluid available to his low-budget effects crew is squirted and splashed at everything and everyone.
Lionel keeps Mum in the basement with a slowly accumulating menagerie of likewise bitten and transformed zombies. As Diana Penalver's drippy and uninteresting cardboard cutout of a spurned love interest mopes about Lionel's front door, the Ed-Grimley-meets-Ash featherweight is semi-terrorized by his foul Uncle Les (Ian Watkin), who hopes to acquire the house.
The scales tip when Les throws a giant party and the zombies get out. From there, the biologically noisome set pieces erupt into a full-tilt lawnmower-on-undead apocalypse, complete with cackling zombie baby (born of a particularly bizarre coupling of the deceased) and a giant demon-Mum bent on jamming Lionel back into her womb.
For laughs, "Dead Alive" is fine; but is juvenile at best. Like Raimi's Evil Dead efforts in 1981 and 1987, Jackson's film undercuts its best ideas with the merely boneheaded. Crew members toss rubber arms and legs all over, hose the actors down with slop, and blow gobs of puss into pudding, but unlike Neil Marshall's graphic, pointed, and hilarious "Dog Soldiers," there are no scares here, no real moments of exhilaration.
Instead the film groans under its excess and no one can move without triggering a full collapse into Stone Age moronity. No viewer will ever unsee the image of the giant mother-beast splitting open and sucking Lionel back up the birth canal, but in some way one kind of wishes Jackson had similarly returned this dripping product to gestation. It is all style and no substance. Its theme is delivered with the subtlety of a nuclear blast, and its execution barely rises above what could best be described as pornography of thrown liquids.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
