Extreme Cinema: Day 3

Day 3: Braindead (Peter Jackson, 1992)

Braindead is the only film in history, to my knowledge at least, that features our hero being attacked by an intestinal tracked, complete with farting sphincter.

I’m rather surprised with regards to this film. Had it been released just six years prior, chances are it would have been banned outright. But, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your disposition, it managed to pass the British censors uncut with an 18 certificate, a feat that it failed to achieve across the pond, where substantial cuts were made by the MPAA (The Motion Picture Association of America) in order to achieve an R rating.

But maybe it was a sign that the BBFC finally got the joke (something they’d failed to do with the equally nasty and equally funny The Evil Dead, which had been on the list of video nasties during the height of the video nasties scare) that left Braindead completely intact. For want of a better word, Braindead is by far the most gruesome comedy ever made, but a comedy it is. It just happens to be doused with buckets of blood to the tune of five gallons a second, making it, officially, the bloodiest movie ever made.

As British film critic Mark Kermode said in his intro to the film during its run on Channel 4’s own Extreme Cinema season: “many were surprised that such a film was possible, let alone legal” and to quantify his statement, you need not look any further that the film’s opening. All of two minutes in, Peter Jackson has already brutally dismembered a New Zealand zoo official unfortunate to be contaminated with whatever it is that causes the mutation. Yet it’s later during the deliriously spastic climax that we suss that dismemberment is the only way forward. What Jackson presents here are not your average slumbering zombies but a virus that manipulates any part of the human body. So we get heads with spines still attached sleazily making eyes at our heroine, legs walking on their own, decapitated bodies searching for their heads and the aforementioned farting sphincter that seems hell bent on strangling our hero. Quite how the filmmakers managed much of the onscreen muck is startling but you’ll be too busy repeatedly shouting “what the fuck!?” to really care.

Yet the piece-de-resistance comes in the form of our hero and his power mower. Ploughing his way through the zombie horde (“party’s over!”), the lawnmower dices its quarry into tiny meaty chunks and sprays body parts like confetti. If that weren’t enough, his love interest is busy in the kitchen disposing of the human remains using a blender.

To read this, it would be hard to find any of this funny, but there is a wicked streak of humour that runs right through the film. In contrast to Lucio Fulci, Peter Jackson’s eye for gore is so over the top, you quickly question whether the filmmakers were actually taking any of it seriously. They clearly weren’t, and whilst Braindead succeeds in being, arguably, the most gruesome film ever made, it is also light hearted fun. Watch the moment when the gent has his rib-cage, his fucking rib-cage, torn out and then tell me if you still see it as serious cinema.

And all this from the man who went on to make Lord of the Rings. The mind boggles.

4/5