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Dead Alive
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Metascore
54 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 7 Critics What's this?

User Score
7.5 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 17 Ratings

Your Score
10 out of 10
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  • Starring: Diana Peņalver, Elizabeth Moody, Ian Watkin, Timothy Balme
  • Summary: On a quiet street, in a small town, pure evil has come to stay. An innocent young man forced to care for his domineering mother finds the task a whole lot more demanding after she's bitten by the cursed Sumatran rat monkey. Passing the point of death, Vera sucks friends and family into her gruesome existence among the living dead and Lionel is sent spiraling into a ghoulish nightmare. Now a crazed zombie, she soon infects enough people to make it difficult for Lionel, still the faithful son, to keep the neighbors from suspecting that something is terribly wrong. (Lion's Gate)… Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 7
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 7
  3. Negative: 1 out of 7
  1. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    78
    The "Citizen Kane" of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to death-comedy-love stories... So gleefully over-the-top that it's decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent... Sick. Perverse. Brilliant.
  2. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Michael Gingold
    60
    An almost unrelenting barrage of gore, Dead Alive is also a constant assault on the funnybone, a film in which the graphic blood-spilling is taken so far over the top that it becomes hilarious instead of disgusting.
  3. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    20
    Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]
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User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 7
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 7
  3. Negative: 0 out of 7

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