Braindead

• The infamous lawnmower finale poured roughly 300 liters of fake blood as Lionel wades through the horde, gushing as fast as five gallons a second. The film held the record for most fake blood used in a movie until the 2013 Evil Dead remake.
• Jackson invented the Sumatran Rat-Monkey out of whole cloth - there's no such animal. The opening-reel creature was animated in deliberately jerky stop-motion as a tip of the hat to Ray Harryhausen and King Kong's Merian C. Cooper, and Jackson set it loose on Skull Island. Years later his King Kong remake hides a crate stamped 'Sumatran Rat Monkey - Beware the bite.'
• Made for about $3 million and shot on Super 16mm rather than 35mm, then blown up to 35mm for theaters - a deliberate call that funneled the money into the practical gore instead of image quality.
• The carnage got it banned or gutted across multiple territories - Germany, South Korea, Singapore, and Finland all blocked it, with Finland not releasing the uncut version until 2001. The US R-rated cut runs roughly 85 minutes versus the 97-minute unrated version.
• Forrest J. Ackerman, the Famous Monsters of Filmland editor, turns up in a cameo credited as 'Tourist at Zoo with Monsters of Filmland magazine.'
• Composer Peter Dasent scored both films, so Jackson reused the organ tune 'Sodomy' from his earlier puppet-splatter movie Meet the Feebles (1989) for the scene where mourners file into the church before the embalming sequence.

The whole plague is a literalized reading of toxic enmeshment. Vera is bitten while spying on Lionel's first date, then her undead body becomes the basement secret he can never stop tending - the infection is the mother-son bond made flesh, and Lionel only breaks free when he climbs back into the monstrous womb of the giant Vera-creature and tears his way out, finally born for real.

The 1957 setting and prim Anglo-suburban Wellington frame the gore as a revolt against repression: every character drowning the dead in tea-party manners gets devoured first, the priest who declares 'I kick ass for the Lord' dies fast, and the bodily chaos reads as everything polite postwar society refused to say out loud finally bursting through the wallpaper.

Paquita's tarot reading - she's told her destiny lies with Lionel - works as the film's straight-faced spine under the splatter. The Rat-Monkey, the curse, the family rot are all fate machinery, and the lovers surviving the apocalypse together is the movie quietly insisting that romance is the one force strong enough to outlast a house full of the dead.

A bite from a caged Sumatran Rat-Monkey turns Lionel Cosgrove's domineering mother into something that won't stay buried, and her appetite spreads through 1957 Wellington faster than Lionel can hide the bodies in his basement. He sedates the dead, stitches the falling-apart, and keeps feeding the growing horde while romancing Paquita, a shopkeeper's daughter. It all collapses at a house party that becomes a slaughter, ending with Lionel strapping on a push mower and wading into a room of the undead. Peter Jackson's mama's-boy nightmare is a gut-soaked comedy about the cost of never cutting the apron strings.