Dead-Alive: 4K restorations of Peter Jackson’s early films in the works

Peter Jackson is currently doing the press rounds for his Disney+ docu-series The Beatles: Get Back, and while talking to him about that project, the folks over at Uproxx inadvertently unearthed the news that Jackson is working on 4K restorations of his “early films” – with specific reference being made to a 4K restoration of his 1992 gore-splattered horror comedy classic Dead-Alive, a.k.a. Braindead!

This awesome revelation came right at the beginning of the Uproxx interview:

Uproxx: Before we get to The Beatles, around Halloween my friend let me borrow a DVD of Dead Alive, or Braindead, I know it has two titles. That is a great movie. I hadn’t seen it.

Jackson: Oh, thank you so much, thank you. Thank you, we’ve been held up a bit by doing this Beatles film, but we are trying to remaster all those early films…

Uproxx: Right, because apparently that movie is hard to come across and I had to watch an old DVD…

Jackson: Yes. It would’ve been a little bit of a crappy quality for this, because all the DVDs that were out there were done back in the 1990s. So we are doing a remastering and whole digital 4K thing and it looks great. But we’ve been trying to do all that in between Beatles stuff, and that’s been put on a shelf for a while. But, hopefully, within another year or so they’ll come out remastered.

Directed by Jackson from a screenplay he wrote with Fran Walsh (with Stephen Sinclair receiving story credit), Dead-Alive has been called one of the goriest movies ever made. The synopsis:

Overprotective mother Vera Cosgrove (Elizabeth Moody), spying on her grown son, Lionel (Timothy Balme), as he visits the zoo with the lovely Paquita (Diana Peñalver), is accidentally bitten by the fearsome Sumatran rat-monkey. When the bite turns his beloved mother into a zombie, Lionel tries to keep her locked safely in the basement, but her repeated escapes turn most of the neighbors into the walking dead, who then crash a high-society party thrown by Lionel’s boorish Uncle Les (Ian Watkin).

Given that Jackson said they’re remastering “all those early films”, here’s hoping we have 4K versions of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Heavenly Creatures to look forward to as well.