Metacritic Film

Dead Alive

Starring Timothy Balme, Diana Peñalver, Ian Watkin, Brenda Kendall, Stuart Devenie, Jed Brophy, Stephen Papps, and Murray Keane

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Trimark Pictures
Suspense/Thriller
97 minutes | Color
New Zealand
Released In Theaters February 12, 1993

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)

WRITTEN BY
Stephen Sinclair (and story)
Frances Walsh
Peter Jackson

DIRECTED BY
Peter Jackson

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

54 / 100

Critic Reviews

78	Austin Chronicle 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.
75	Entertainment Weekly A gonzo splatterfest from New Zealand that manages to stay breezy and good-natured even as you're watching heads get snapped off of spurting torsos.
70	Variety Technically, this is Jackson's best to date, with state of the art creature and gore effects by Richard Taylor and prosthetics design by Bob McCarron. There's any amount of dismemberment, disembowelling, beheading, and the like, all of it handled with bloody conviction.
70	Time Staff (Not Credited) There is good, broad humor amid the very gross gore effects. And when the Living Impaired stalk our hero's home, it's a family reunion out of your bloodiest nightmares. [8 Feb 1993, p.83]
60	TV Guide Michael Gingold 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.
50	Chicago Reader Ordinarily I don't care for this kind of thing at all, but something must be said for Jackson's endless reserves of giddy energy; perhaps because this is so clearly meant to be silly, he generally avoids the calculated mean-spiritedness of more prestigious directors like Spielberg and Renny Harlin.
20	The New York Times 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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