Braindead

Braindead (1992) is about a man whose mother becomes a zombie after a monkey bite. Lionel lives with his mother in New Zealand. She controls him and permits him no friends. He meets a girl; she follows them, and at the zoo she is bitten by a monkey. She dies and does not die. He locks her in the cellar and gives her sedatives. Then the people she bites turn as well and the cellar fills up. The premise is a domestic comedy: Lionel is trying to hide all of it, and a dinner party has to be held in the house. The humour is entirely bodily and deliberately nauseating. A scene with soup and a sequence involving a pram are the most cited passages. The final section takes place at a house party and runs about half an hour. Peter Jackson used an enormous quantity of fake blood for it; it is regarded as one of the bloodiest finales in cinema and involves a lawnmower. All of the effects are practical: latex, hydraulics, puppets and pumps. Jackson made The Lord of the Rings nine years after this; the distance between the two is a leap rarely seen in cinema. It was made cheaply in New Zealand and was censored in many countries, remaining banned in some for a long time. It was released in America as Dead Alive. It became a cult film and is treated as a benchmark within the genre. It runs 104 minutes. Good for: extreme horror comedy, practical effects, and cult film. Less good for: the quantity of blood and tissue is genuinely extreme; do not open it with a weak stomach.