James Wilson recalls the day when zombies invaded the courtroom
Peter Jackson is New Zealand’s best known and most successful film director. His Lord of the Rings trilogy won 17 of the 30 Academy Awards for which it was nominated. His first “mainstream” film, Heavenly Creatures, dealt sensitively and imaginatively with one of New Zealand’s most notorious crimes, the Parker-Hulme murder of 1954. He produced the intelligent science fiction film District 9 and also directed a well-received remake of King Kong.
Braindead
With all that in mind, it usually comes as a surprise for people to learn that his first two films, Bad Taste and Braindead, were “splatter horrors”, and indeed extreme examples of what is already a far-fetched and farcical genre. I imagine that the target audience for both films was in the nature of drunken students rather than, for example, senior judges. Yet Braindead (AKA Dead Alive) became the subject of a lawsuit, necessitating its viewing in full in the solemn surrounds of the High Court, presided over by the patrician figure of the Honourable
