Braindead
Yesterday was Halloween, so I watched Braindead. Peter Jackson’s love letter to his favourite films: King Kong, Raiders of the Lost Ark and schlocky gory stuff.
The plot is paper thin:
- Momma’s boy meets girl
- Momma doesn’t like girl
- Momma gets bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey, turns into a zombie and infects the better part of a New Zealand town
- Boy still doesn’t have to courage to kill her
- Girl gets into life-threatening situations
- Boy saves her while literally coming out of his mother’s womb.
There’s also parallel stuff going on:
- Tarot card reading
- Raiders-style explorer running from natives while partners kick-start the escape vehicle
- A preacher that literally kicks arse for the Lord
- Greasers that also get turned into zombies, after getting their asses kicked by that preacher
- Slapstick involving a zombie baby conceived in one day
- An uncle that wants to shag everything that moves AND wants the boy’s money.
The effects are the schlockiest, the Sumatran rat monkey is stop motion, there are gallons of blood, entrails strangle people to death, arms, legs, etc flying off, lawnmowers used as makeshift melee weapons.
It’s a fun romp, but nothing more than that.
●●●○
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.