Dead Alive (Braindead): Peter Jackson's Splatter Comedy Peak

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

There is a story people tell about Peter Jackson, and it goes: video-shop kid from Pukerua Bay makes home-made splatter films, then somehow ends up an Oscar-laden lord of Middle-earth. The film that sits at the hinge of that story is Braindead (1992), released in North America as Dead Alive, and it remains the most concentrated dose of what made Jackson worth watching in the first place. It is, by a wide and gleeful margin, the goriest film ever made — production reportedly ran through hundreds of litres of fake blood for the finale alone — and it is also, disarmingly, a tender little comedy about a boy who cannot leave his mother. Those two facts are the whole film, and the way they braid together is why it endures.

Street Trash: The Melt Movie as Reagan-Era Fable

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000

There is a small, disreputable genre of 1980s horror that fans call the melt movie, and Street Trash is its filthy masterpiece. The premise is a one-line joke: a liquor-store owner finds a dusty case of wine called Tenafly Viper walled up in his cellar, sells it for a dollar a bottle to the homeless men living in a junkyard, and the wine dissolves anyone who drinks it into a puddle of glowing coloured slime. That is the whole engine. What makes the film worth a revisit almost forty years on is that Jim Muro and writer-producer Roy Frumkes built something around that joke — a genuinely angry, genuinely funny fable about who American prosperity decided was disposable, told in the most tasteless idiom available.

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Dead Alive (Braindead): Peter Jackson's Splatter Comedy Peak

Street Trash: The Melt Movie as Reagan-Era Fable