Between Peter Jackson’s penchant for cartoonish unserious gore and Bob McCarron’s off-screen makeup effects manipulations, Braindead achieves something that approaches inspired genius in the heretofore unknown artform of human carnage. The film is filled with moments of joyous slapstick tableaux – hilarious scenes with a luncheon amid a group of stuffy society women where Liz Moody’s body parts splatter into the custard and she munches unnoticing on her own ear; or the nurse with the plaster bird impaled in her forehead who has to have her sliced neck tipped back to force food into her throat. However, it is in the last 20 minutes or so that Jackson and McCarron go for broke – with the hero being pursued through the house by a severed torso and still ambulatory sets of legs and a set of intestines that mutate into their own body and twist their way up his trouser leg as he helplessly hangs from a light socket; or where Tim Balme attempts to escape from the zombies but finds he cannot make any progress because he is running on blood only to then find he can make his escape by jumping between decapitated heads. And then there is that moment where Braindead finally breaks through to achieve a transcendentally surreal glory of excess where Tim Balme wades into battle against the zombies armed with a lawnmower, drenching an entire room in showers of blood. (Braindead holds the record for the greatest amount of artificial blood ever used in a film). The film is a work of perverse genius.

One cannot go without mentioning the wonderful sense of period the film achieves. Peter Jackson has a great affinity for the sheer banality of Kiwi culture – of baked bean lunches, of plaster garden gnomes and bathroom ducks, the trams, the brand-name cleaning powders – all recreated here with a loving nostalgia that no other New Zealand filmmaker has yet succeeded in tapping. There was an enormous furore among the respectable establishment – the same establishment that celebrated Jackson’s overrated Heavenly Creatures (1994) – when the New Zealand Media Awards named Braindead Best Film of 1992. For all that, Braindead achieves a far more accurate picture of New Zealand’s recent past than any other more respectable film had done up to that point.

Braindead was later recreated as a stage musical Braindead: The Musical (1995), one where curtains had to be placed between the stage and the audiences during the climactic finale to prevent them being drenched in gore.

Braindead should not be confused with the other similarly titled films, the fascinating reality bending Brain Dead (1989) and a further but far less effective zombie splatter film Brain Dead (2007).

Peter Jackson subsequently went onto make:- the international arthouse hit Heavenly Creatures, the flop ghost comedy The Frighteners (1996) and then recovered to the great acclaim of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), his remake of King Kong (2005), the afterlife film The Lovely Bones (2009) and the upcoming The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: There and Back Again (2013). Jackson has also produced District 9 (2009) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).