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Sorry, your browser doesn't suppor Java. Skull Island, Southwest Sumatra, 1957. Zoo official Stewart captures a rat-monkey and ignores warnings that eviil spirits will get revenge. When the monkey attacks Stewart, his guides dismember him and ship the animal to Wellington Zoo. There timid Lionel, a man dominated by his emasculating, cleanliness -obsessed mother, meets Spanish Paquita. At the zoo Mum, spying on Lionel and Paquita,  slips on a banana skin, lunges at the rat-monkey's cage and is bitten on the arm. That night Paquita and Lionel make love in Lionel's bedroom while, in hers, Mum's health deteriorates alarmingly. Entertaining "society" next day, she begins to disintegrate. The party breaks up after Mr Matheson eats custard containing blood and pus from Mom's arm and Mum eats her own ear. Lionel, finding Mum devouring raw meat, promises to look after her. After eating Paquita's dog Mum dies, rising up again as a zombie. Lionel arks her in the cellar and persuades Nazi vet Heinrich to supply him with a tranquilizer, to be administered to Mum via nose injection. Matters escalate when Mum creates more zombies. Gross Uncle Les holds a party to celebrate blackmailing Lionel into handing over the house, but the zombies break out and in the ensuing blood fest Paquita and Lionel deal with the undead by liquifying them. Paquita feeds dismembered zombie parts into a blender. Lionel, aided by Paquita's grandmother's lucky talisman and having learned that his mother murdered his father, rampages with a motor mower. The last zombie to dispatch is Mum, even more grotesque than before. With the house alight in a purging fire Lionel and Paquita stroll away together.

Braindead is a brilliantly designed and executed comedy splatter, solemnly introduced by Queen Elizabeth, as in Jackson's Bad Taste.

To bring it's severed limbs, decapitated heads and decomposing bodies vividly to life, the large special effects unit used masses of maple syrup (for blood), pork fat, offal, latex, polyfoam and slime. Models make up many of the period street scenes. Humour comes in visual and verbal gags. The carnage at Uncle Les's party is the most absurd series of slapstick sequences, but, going on as long as it does, becomes repetitive. (This scene was shortened in the US version.) Performances are excellent, with Peter Jackson's cameo as a crazed undertaker's assistant a highlight.