Dead Alive (1992)

Summary

Lionel is a kindly, gentle young man, cheerfully shouldering the burden of caring for his aging and demanding mother, Vera. Even after she is bitten by a rare clay-mation Sumatran rat-monkey and her skin starts to peel off, he stands by her and cares for her with love and compassion, setting aside his own desires, even his burgeoning "romantic entanglement" with the lovely and flirtatious Paquita. Unfortunately, zombies have a way of getting out of control and soon Lionel is in way over his head, even before he stumbles across the old family secret hidden in the attic . . . Please make sure to get the unrated version, rather than the R-rated version. You'll miss some of the best stuff if you don't.

Barbara's Rant

Much has been made of the gore in this movie by other reviewers, and rightfully so, as it is both profuse and creative. I can hardly think of words of praise high enough for a movie involving a decapitated zombie with a lawn gnome stuffed down his neck, not to mention the embalming fluid spewing out of Vera's bloated, pulsing corpse, and I know I don't even need to bring up the dramatic finale! But what truly puts this movie in a class of its own is the human element. How often is one fortunate enough to come across a main character who undergoes a true journey of personal growth, even as he sticks syringes full of animal tranquilizer up zombies' noses and purees the undead with a lawnmower? Without the devastating and revolting events of this movie Lionel might never have plumbed the depths of his own tremendous capacities, both for violence and for tenderness. It takes a special person to wade with eyes open into a sea of ghouls armed only with a gas-powered gardening tool (To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, Lionel awakes and finds that he is strong.), but for that same man to be able to look with profound compassion and love into the bulging eyes of a murderous, rotting, animated corpse which was once his mother is truly remarkable. He has seen her savage living men, devour a full grown dog, and chew on her own detached ear and still he cares for her with the same devotion he lavished upon her all his life. That is remarkable and that is admirable and that is understandable, however grotesque and Norman Bates-ish it may initially appear, because how could Lionel ever recognize the moment at which she ceased to be the mother whom he loved? Had she developed Alzheimer's, for example, which would have altered her personality to a comparable degree, though much more gradually and less violently, we would applaud Lionel for standing by her.

Yet in the end, Lionel lets Vera go, or tries to. He holds her in his arms and injects her with poison, thinking that he is finally and ultimately destroying the woman who has been the most important person in the world to him for as long as he has been alive. What changed? It cannot simply be that Paquita gave him the strength to go on without his mother because Lionel never lacked the strength to be on his own; he lacked the desire to leave his mother while she still needed him. Paquita gave him, rather, the eyes to see that his mother was already long dead and perhaps also enough affection for people other than Vera to realize that her continued tortured existence is not worth the cost that it would inevitably continue to exact in innocent human lives.

In a way, Lionel was very fortunate that this whole zombie / rat monkey incident occurred. He had time to accustom himself to seeing his mother in a new and unflattering light, as a killer, a flesh-eater, and a pus-oozing monster, before he was forced to confront the awful secret of her past and to deal with the fact that she is, and has always been, a liar and a murderer. I suspect that without that buffer, his discovery in the attic and the subsequent emergence of long-suppressed memories might have broken Lionel, have driven him mad, had his world been so abruptly turned on its head. It may also to have been to his advantage to get a practice run at fatherhood before making a long-term commitment to Paquita.

BARBARA JO

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