Before he set sail for Middle Earth, both spending and making millions for New Line Cinema, New Zealand director Peter Jackson had made something of a name for himself making low budget films that explored the outer limits of taste – indeed his first feature film was Bad Taste (1987), not so much a film title as a statement of intent. He followed it with the puppet-based madness of Meet the Feebles (1989) which had started life as a short film for television, but which was expanded to feature length following enthusiasm for a Japanese investor and the slow progress he was making on a zombie film script. That script would eventually be made as Braindead, released in New Zealand in August 1992 and in the States, as Dead Alive, in February 1993, instantly attaining cult status and a reputation for being the goriest film ever made. It would mark the end of the “splatter” phase of Jackson’s career as it’s success led to bigger budgets and a drift away from sex, gore and mayhem.

It opens in 1957 with a spoof of the Indiana Jones films. Intrepid, machine gun toting zoo official Stewart McAlden (TV journalist Bill Ralston) leads a team to the remote Skull Island (the setting for King Kong which Jackson would remake in 2005) to capture a Sumatran rat-monkey, a vicious hybrid created when plague-carrying rats were brought to the island and they raped of indigenous tree monkeys. The expedition ends in disaster, but the rat-monkey is sent back to New Zealand and installed as an exhibit at the Wellington Zoo. Nearby, downtrodden Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme) lives with his domineering mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody), struggling with the trauma of his father having drowned while trying to save him at the beach. He falls in love with Spanish Romani shopkeeper’s daughter Paquita María Sánchez (Diana Peñalver), the horror of the appalling Vera, and are on a visit to the zoo when the rat-monkey bites Vera. Over the next few days, Vera become increasingly ill, her skin peeling off and her ear detaching and falling into a bowl of custard during a dinner thrown for the heads of the Wellington Ladies’ Welfare League (Lionel has to glue a flap of skin back on to make her at least part-way respectable). She eventually dies but returns as a zombie who infects her nurse Mrs McTavish and several others before chaos breaks out at a party held at Lionel and Vera’s house by the repulsive Uncle Les (Ian Watkin) in which all of the guests are infected and Lionel has to get to work with a large lawnmower…

Although it’s less grubby than Meet the Feebles, a film that’s guaranteed to leave almost everyone feeling deeply uncomfortable for so many reasons, Braindead shares the trait of all of Jackson’s early films of tending towards the juvenile at time. It’s not even remotely subtle, gleefully revelling in its bad taste gross outs and, in the lawnmower-based finale in which Lionel ploughs his bloody way through the ranks of the dead, gore and severed body parts flying in all directions, more than earns its reputation for violent excess. But it’s all done with tongue firmly in cheek, with a playfulness that disarms (if you’ll forgive the pun…) the objections of all but the most determined to be offended. Indeed, such was the absurdity of the gore and violence that even the notoriously scissor-happy British Board of Film Censors briefly considered awarding it a 15 certificate instead of the 18 that they eventually settled on. “In the end,” noted the Board’s unnamed examiner, “I went with ’18’ simply on the pragmatic grounds that most people would expect the astonishing amount of gore here to be ’18’. But I can’t imagine even a sensitive teenager being bothered by this.”

The gags – visual and verbal, witty and knockabout slapstick – are thrown out at such breakneck speed that you can guarantee something to tickle your funny bone coming along every few minutes. It’s rarely laughing out loud, rolling on the floor funny but it’s frequently very silly and amusing, the best laughs coming mainly from Stuart Devenie’s earnest, kung-fu fighting Father McGruder (“I kick arse for the Lord!”) and the sheer absurdity of the amount of gore being flung around – it’s been estimated that 300 litres of fake blood was used in the finale alone, a record at the time. Elsewhere Jackson satirises suburban 50s provincialism rather nicely, with its world of Ladies’ Welfare Leagues, curtain twitching neighbours and a feeling of everyone knowing your business, a particular problem for a young man trying to keep his zombie mum away from prying eyes.

The deliberately sappy love story between the two young leads – often more off than on – is nicely played in a deliberately old-fashioned manner and is constantly being subverted by all manner of nastiness. Although characterisation is almost non-existent, the performances are likable enough for us to least worry about the character’s safety. A last-minute attempt to curry sympathy with the revelation about what really happened to Lionel’s dad doesn’t really land as by the time we get to it we’re already reeling from the lawnmower bloodbath and the sight of a monstrous, mutated Vera looming over the family home, a throwback to the puppetry of Meet the Feebles. But there are plenty of oddballs, eccentrics and grotesques to keep the body count high and some of them, particularly the priest, are great fun.

Braindead would prove to be a turning point for Jackson. His next film would be the very different Heavenly Creatures (1994) and that in itself would be a stepping stone to Hollywood, its success leading him to the door of Universal Pictures who hired him to direct The Frighteners (1996). And since then, Jackson has barely looked back. The Lord of the Rings films were hugely popular though his King Kong remake was horribly bloated and an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s bestseller The Lovely Bones (2009) came, went and is virtually forgotten already. In more recent times, after converting Tolkien’s very short novel The Hobbit into three gigantic blockbusters, he’s turned his attentions to favourably received documentaries that restored and colourised existing material to impressive effect – the moving World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and the alternative to the last Beatle’s film (1970’s Let It Be), the excellent three-parter Get Back (2020). Some still lament the passing of the gore days but they’re a long time in the past now and one suspects that it would take something quite remarkable for Jackson to go back to those ways now. And to honest, after the wonderful excesses of Braindead, what else could hope to do with the gore film anyway?