“Brain Dead,” also known as “Dead Alive,” is possibly the single bloodiest gore-fest ever created for the big screen. It's also one of the funniest slapstick comedies ever made. Long before Peter Jackson turned his formidable talents to “The Lord of the Rings,” he was making this movie on a shoestring budget, relying on his own skills in homemade special effects along with buckets of imagination. I mean guts.

What makes Brain Dead so special? It's a lot of things. This movie has an evil baby with a barbed-wire baby carriage, a lawnmower massacre, a man running in place from a horde of zombies because the floor's too slippery with blood for him to get any traction, a fight between a kickboxing priest (“I kick arse for the Lord!”) and a gang of rockabilly zombies, an ear falling into a bowl of custard and accidentally getting eaten, a pile of zombie intestines that kill through strangulation, a blender used as a deadly weapon, Tarot cards, true love, and a Sumatran rat monkey.

Brain Dead made me laugh out loud over and over again the first time I saw it, and not many movies can do that. Is it scary? Not to me, but my personal theory is that people who find horror movies scary don't watch them anyway. I love this movie because it's funny, and no amount of repulsive gore is ever going to detract from that. So go ahead and throw a zombie baby in a blender- this one is a keeper.