Braindead

Braindead (also known as Dead Alive in North America) is a 1992 New Zealand zombie comedy splatter film directed by Peter Jackson, produced by Jim Booth, and written by Stephen Sinclair, Fran Walsh, and Jackson based on an original story idea by Sinclair. It stars Timothy Balme, Diana Peñalver, Elizabeth Moody and Ian Watkin. The plot follows Lionel, a young man living in South Wellington with his strict mother Vera. After Lionel becomes romantically entangled with a girl named Paquita, Vera is bitten by a hybrid rat-monkey creature and begins to transform into a zombie, while also infecting swathes of the city's populace. Made on a budget of $3 million, Braindead was Jackson's most expensive film up to that point. Although it received positive reviews from critics, it was a box office bomb. It has since received a cult following, and is now widely regarded as one of the goriest films of all time. Plot In 1957, zoologist Stewart McAlden and his team smuggle a captured Sumatran rat-monkey, a hybrid creature that resulted from the rape of tree monkeys by plague-carrying rats, out of Skull Island. During the team's escape from the island's warrior natives, who demand the return of the creature, Stewart is bitten by the rat-monkey, resulting in his dismemberment and killing by his crew, who fear the effects of the bite. As per Stewart's warning to the natives, "this monkey's going to Newtown", the captured rat-monkey is then shipped to Wellington Zoo by the survivors of the expedition. In Wellington, Lionel Cosgrove lives in Hataitai in a Victorian mansion with his domineering mother Vera. When he was a child, Lionel's father drowned trying to save him at the beach, and the incident has haunted him into adulthood. To Vera's dismay, Lionel falls in love with a Spanish Romani shopkeeper's daughter, Paquita María Sánchez, who is convinced the two are destined to be together. When the two visit the Wellington zoo together on a date, Vera follows them and is bitten by the rat-monkey, killing the animal in the process. Over the following days, she grows increasingly more decrepit; her skin begins to peel and her ear falls off during lunch with friends. She appears to die before reanimating as a ravenous zombie and killing the attending nurse Mrs. McTavish, who also returns as a zombie, before Lionel locks them both in the basement and keeps them sedated with animal tranquilizers. While visiting Paquita, Lionel is given a pendant for luck by her grandmother.