Dead/Alive

Institute History

  • 1993 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Firmly establishing himself as the king of splatter gore, Peter Jackson, creator of Bad Taste and the muppet massacre, Meet the Feebles, truly pulls off a masterpiece of the grotesque With Dead/Alive.

Chock full of severed limbs, flying heads, and buckets of slime and goop, Dead/Alive is actually a witty social satire combined with a triumphant little love story. For anyone who thinks the fifties were all poodle skirts and smiles, Jackson takes the stereotypes and turns them inside out.

Lionel, twenty-five and never been kissed, is a prisoner in his mother's house until the day he meets Paquita, a Spanish girl who works at the corner shop. When Mother follows the young lovers to the zoo, she stumbles against the cage of a vicious Sumatran rat monkey. The creature sinks its toxic fangs into her arm, and from there, it's history. All hell breaks loose as Lionel and Paquita battle the putrefying virus which transforms Mother and everyone else it touches It cannot be a coincidence that Peter Jackson was born on Halloween. He clearly has horror in his blood.



Friday Jan 29 Midnight
Egyptian Theatre

$6.00

— Catherine Schulman

Screening Details

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