5 Silly Movies That Actually Had Profound Meanings

1. Dead Alive

Dead Alive is the goriest movie ever made. It€™s so gory it€™s not even funny, but then it goes right back around and becomes funny again. The lawnmower scene alone would be enough to secure the film a spot in cult-cinema fans€™ All Time Classics, but the film around it is a hell of a good time. A pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson does an admirable job recreating the look and feel of the 50€™s on a shoe-string budget. It makes it all the more hilarious when this Leave It To Beaver suburbia is invaded by flesh-hungry zombies that don€™t stop coming for you even after you€™ve chopped €˜em to bits. The film is so over-the-top, and so loaded with gag after gag after gross-out after gross-out gag, that it€™d be easy to chalk the whole thing up to a meaningless lark. Indeed, many view the film as little more than Jackson having a goofy blast before getting to work on €˜real€™ cinema like Heavenly Creatures or LOTR. But that sells short the achievement of Dead Alive. For starters, the film has a well-charted arc for mama€™s-boy main character Lionel. His (literal) rebirth into an indestructible zombie-killing bad-a-s is one of the better, more triumphant journeys for a horror protagonist this side of Bruce Campbell. And besides that, disregarding Dead Alive as gooey genre piffle misses out on some of Jackson€™s satirical points. Dead Alive is every bit the commentary on society that Heavenly Creatures was, a scant two years later. Heavenly Creatures (also a period piece) received praise for the way it portrayed the battle between burgeoning youth and the repressive adults. Dead Alive makes much the same point (albeit with zombies). By grounding the film in the 50€™s and spending a great deal of time lampooning the cartoonish upper-crust of society, Jackson makes the undead horde into a larger metaphor for the cataclysmic culture shifts that would be set in motion in the 60€™s. The youth culture wasn€™t just growing out of the old ones, it was literally tearing out through it. (Because zombies, get it?) Whether it€™s the priest rediscovering his libido post-re-animation, or loud-but-ordinary get-together devolving into a non-stop bloodbath, the wild zombies destroy every established thing in their path. Which makes Lionel€™s literal rebirth all the more resonant. In life, his mother was everything restrictive and hateful about one generation. In un-death, she was everything animalistic about the next. By slicing his way out of her (Note: This movie is sort of gross) Lionel declares himself better and stronger than the worst aspects of what came before, allowing him and his love to move forwards into a new life. Also, this movie has priest yell, €œI KICK ARSE FOR THE LORD!€ and then he does flying kung-fu against zombies. How much more profound do you need?