Here's how the vicious little Sumatran Rat-Monkey links Peter Jackson's Braindead to Bad Taste and Meet The Feebles with the man who became the Academy Award-winning director behind respectable Hollywood blockbusters. Braindead is considered one of the best of his early work and is a zombie comedy that reaches new heights in screen gore. While the film was retitled Dead Alive during its U.S. release - to avoid conflict with the Bill Pullman/Bill Paxton film Brain Dead - most fans know it best as Braindead.
Following the completion of his epic King Kong featured great performances and memorable sequences, though it was criticized as needlessly long and self-indulgent.
On the surface, Jackson's Braindead and his King Kong remake have little to do with one another, but there's one creature that explicitly links them. This is the Sumatran Rat-Monkey - AKA Simian Raticus - which is introduced in the prologue of Braindead. This opening is set in 1957 and follows explorers capturing this nasty beast on Skull Island. The natives try to stop this as the Rat-Monkey is infected with a "Rage Plague" carried through its bite, which can turn people in flesh-eating zombies. It bites the group leader, which forces his assistants to kill him and the Rat-Monkey is later brought to a New Zealand zoo.
It later bites the overbearing mother of hero Lionel, and while she quickly kills it in retaliation, the bite turns her into a zombie, which causes a whole heap of mayhem. The creature doesn't physically appear during King Kong and instead, a cage labeled "Sumatran Rat Monkey - Beware the bite!" is seen in the cargo hold of the SS Venture. The film's tie-in book The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island filled in a little more detail on the species, revealing they live in the trenches of Skull Island and are often food for the giant spiders that populate it.
While the tones of the Braindead and King Kong are quite different, its no surprise the Sumatran Rat-Monkey's home is on the nightmarish Skull Island seen in Jackson's version. It's a pity the creature didn't make a little cameo during the latter film, though the easter egg mention was still fun.
