- Director
- Peter Jackson
- Year
- 1992
- Country
- New Zealand
- Runtime
- 104 min
Also released as
- Dead Alive
- Splatters: gli schizzacervelli
- Braindead (Tu madre se ha comido a mi perro)
- Fome Animal
- Tu madre se ha comido a mi perro
- Braindead - Živí mrtví
- Braindead - Der Zombie-Rasenmähermann
Filed under
Braindead
The bloodiest film ever made at the time, and it is a comedy about a man and his mother.
Lionel lives with a domineering mother in 1950s Wellington. She is bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey at the zoo. He keeps her in the cellar, and then keeps her friends there too.
Peter Jackson made it before Heavenly Creatures and long before anything else, and the last twenty minutes use around 300 litres of fake blood pumped at high pressure, including the lawnmower sequence, which remains the reference point for excess in this category.
The gore is entirely slapstick. Nothing in it is intended to disturb and the register is closer to Buster Keaton than to Fulci, which is why people who dislike gore often enjoy it anyway.
The kung-fu priest and the baby in the park are the two other sequences everybody quotes.
Underneath it is a film about a man unable to leave his mother, and the final image is unexpectedly on the nose about it.
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Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
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