Lionel must contain what she's started in his house. Soon she'll have an entire army behind her. When mother leaves the house, she starts attacking townsfolk and turning them into zombies as well. Her behavior gets increasingly violent and Lionel must purchase a syringe in order to fight back against his mother and the ill-fated house guests that she has killed and turned into zombies just like her. She starts losing her skin (an ear, parts of her face, soon her whole body) and eventually goes completely mad, or so it seems. Lionel must take care of her while she is still sane, which won't be for long. The two go to the zoo one day on a date and Lionel's over-protective mother tags along, only to be bitten by the crazed rat monkey. It's 1957 and the likably docile Lionel (Timonthy Balme) is living with his elderly mother (Elizabeth Moody) and is being pursued by a helpless romantic foreigner named Paquita (Diana Penalver). Cut to the town of Wellington, New Zealand where the rat monkey now lives, confined in its cage with the other monkeys at a zoo. It starts out with a sequence involving a couple of misguided explorers on the fictional Skull Island who intend to escape with a caged "Rat Monkey", which has a rather nasty bite. And Jackson couldn't give less of a fuck about it. With "Dead Alive", there simply is no line. Was there a line that Jackson ever considered? Because if there was he not only crosses but disregards it all-together. And by blood and gore, we're talking organs coming back to life, faces being ripped open and necks suffering from a similar fate, flesh exploding into a frenzy of green goo, and a in a famous scene, a lawnmower meeting with mortal flesh and causing certain disfigurement and mutilation. It's such a lively, spontaneous, comic horror farce it embraces special effects for blood and gore like few films before or after it truly have. This is probably one of the most bat-shit insane and violent movies I have ever seen, period. The whole thing has this real low budget aesthetic to it throughout the first half and that's charming, but what's even more-so is the transition from that to all-out gruesome carnage in the third act. His early effort "Dead Alive" (known as "Braindead" some places) is an ode or homage to the mere existence of over-the-top movie violence and gore. Peter Jackson apparently loves blood, guts, gore, and fake red bodily fluids as much as I do. I'm not easily offended or shocked by movie violence and in the case of features like "The Evil Dead" and its sequel, the grotesque becomes the darkly comic and absurd. The more the merrier is my motto when it comes to such a thing. But if we are, then movie blood is what I always crave. I love anything (artificial) that flows in large amounts, even if we aren't speaking of bodily fluids.
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