Events

[SCREENING] Before Peter Jackson went mainstream with a decade of J. R. R. Tolkein adaptations, he was already well known to genre buffs for a trio of outrageous horror comedies made in his native New Zealand: Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead. The last of those, retitled Dead Alive for North America, makes its local theatrical premiere on Thursday, August 25 at the Dipson Amherst Theatre, 25 years after it was made, as the opening entry of Thursday Night Terrors, a new monthly horror and cult film series at the Amherst Theater. 

A “splatstick” comedy that borrows as much from The Evil Dead and Re-Animator as from Monty Python’s more gruesome jokes, Dead Alive is the story of Lionel, a nebbish whose mother opposes his first-ever romance. Things get worse—much worse—when Mama is bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey during a zoo visit and becomes an undead zombie. Lionel tries to keep her undercover with doses of animal tranquilizer, but (of course) things get out of hand in a finale that is the zenith of the genre. To give you an idea, in order to get an R rating for a US video release, the distributor had to cut it by nearly 20%

Other films in the series include the Dario Argento production of Demons (1985); the original Fright Night (1985); Phantasm II (1988), and John Carpenter’s inspired 1983 remake of The Thing.