Braindead (also known as Romeo + Juliet + Zombies) is a slapstick zombie comedy film produced by Vallet Co.. It centers around Juliet Capulet as an awkward teenage girl whose abusive and overprotective father was accidentally bitten by a rare animal that carries a disease that brings disaster to her dysfunctional family, resulting in a zombie epidemic that soon plagues her hometown of Fort Verona.
Plot[]
On Skull Island, a Fort Verona Zoo official and his team smuggle a captured Sumatran rat-monkey, a hybrid creature that resulted from the rape of tree monkeys by plague-carrying rats. During the team's escape from the island's warrior natives, who demand the return of the creature, the official is unintentionally bitten by the rat-monkey, resulting in his dismemberment and killing by his crew, who fear the effects of the bite. As per the official's warning to the natives, "this monkey's going to Fort Verona", the captured rat-monkey is then shipped to Fort Verona Zoo by the survivors of the expedition.
In Fort Verona, Juliet Capulet is an awkward teenage girl who is sequestered in her family's mansion, Capulet Manor, watched over by her abusive father Fulgencio "Cappy" Capulet, and her overprotective cousin Tyrone Capulet, all the while being comforted by her family's head servant, Nessa. When Juliet was a little girl, her mother drowned trying to save her at the beach, and that incident has haunted her since then, forcing Cappy to take desperate measures to ensure his daughter's safety from the world around her. In the meantime, Fort Verona was long-plagued by criminal activity, gang violence, and drug wars due to a feud between the Capulets and Montagues.
One day, Cappy's gang of hired mercenaries, the Capulet Motorcycle Club (led by Tyrone) are about to commit their 230th murder in their career, setting their sights on a man on the town's train station, which was thwarted by their rival gang of bikers, the Montague Motorcycle Club, led by Romeo Montague. Desperately, the Capulets scramble to retrieve Tyrone's knife which the Montagues confiscated from them, but their intense struggle with them catches the attention of Sheriff Escalus, the head of the Fort Verona Police Department, who gathers the two families together and declares that they will be held personally accountable for any further breaches of the peace. At the suggestion of his friends Murray and Ben (Romeo's cousin), Romeo sneaks into the Capulet banquet to return Tyrone's knife to its rightful owner when he gets distracted enough to fall in love with Juliet at first sight; the two instantly share a dance with each other until an angry Tyrone chases him out of the house.
The next day, Cappy learns in dismay from Tyrone about Juliet in love with Romeo, so he follows his daughter and her new boyfriend to the Fort Verona Zoo where the rat-monkey is currently on display. Cappy plans to kill Romeo and retrieve Juliet when he accidentally slips on a nearby banana peel and hits the rat-monkey's cage, intriguing the rat-monkey into biting him by the arm; Cappy's resulting scream in pain reaches Juliet's ears so quickly that she and Romeo are forced to take him home. However, as hours pass, Cappy starts showing signs of aggression after being bitten by the rat-monkey; he blames Nessa for not watching his daughter firmly and fires her. Juliet objects towards her father's increasingly new hostile behavior, but Cappy ejects her from the house so that she can reflect on scapegoating herself and her family's household. Now homeless and father-disowned, Juliet is forced to spend a night sleeping on a bench in the yard of her school, Fort Verona High School, where she seeks out the help of her kindhearted and friendly principal of Fort Verona High, Principal Lawrence, who agrees to sue her father for her abuse the next morning.
After school, Juliet receives a text from Cappy, who is seemingly apologizing for abusing her and wants her back home. Immediately, Juliet returns home only to find the front door locked, forcing her to text him back, but with no answer; she then climbs up to her father's balcony to give a peek through the glass door to check on Cappy lying in his bed. Suddenly, Cappy gets up in an awkward and mysterious manner as he crawls towards the door. At first, Juliet thought her father ended up drunk after kicking her out of the house until she realizes he has already reanimated as a ravenous zombie who tries to strangle his daughter after bursting through the door. Because his hostile behavior has ultimately reached breaking point due to the rat-monkey's bite, Cappy's entire body was all covered with black arteries and veins, along with his irises and sclera glowing blood red. Eventually, Juliet fights back with Nessa's help by locking Cappy in the basement and keeping him sedated with animal tranquilizers. While visiting Romeo, Juliet is given a pendant for luck by his caring mother, Caroline Montague, who is also the current head of his family after her husband's death. Meanwhile, Cappy is able to break out of the basement but is ran over along the way towards the Montague Manor by a nearby tram, enabling Juliet to tranquilize Cappy before he harms anyone.
At her father's funeral, hosted by Tyrone, Juliet is able to evacuate everyone out of the funeral home by shouting, "Allahu Akbar!", before tranquilizing Cappy again to prevent him from attacking the mourners. Later, while returning to the graveyard to administer more of it, Juliet is offered shelter by Romeo and his gang, and she agrees to stay with the Montagues when Tyrone and his gang arrive to interrogate Juliet about a series of incidents ranging from the zoo to the funeral home. Suddenly, Cappy bursts out of his grave to attack Tyrone from behind. Tyrone's gang is so scared of the zombified Cappy that they try to flee from the graveyard, but Cappy picks them off one by one, demonstrating remarkable superhuman speed, strength and agility. In the ensuing commotion, Tyrone and his gang are bitten and become zombies just like Cappy. Juliet stands firm with Romeo and his gang, but the zombies don't see the syringe she's holding as a threat, and they all simply laugh at it. Eventually, with the help of Principal Lawrence (who still has a black belt in karate in his youth), the Montagues and Juliet manage to round up all the zombies and brings them back to Montague Manor for study and further treatment. There, the group discovers that each zombie has several parts that regenerate on their own. Caroline, a medical expert, decides to study the zombies more while Romeo gives Juliet a tour around his home.
The next morning, Sheriff Escalus arrives at Montague Manor to arrest Juliet for causing a mass panic at the funeral home when he suddenly sees the zombies in the basement. After Caroline explains to the Sheriff that all this has occurred, he provides enough solid evidence to evict the Montagues from their home and invite his friends and family over for a housewarming party despite Caroline's objections. Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet are at a science lab at their school to create a cure that would eventually save her Capulet family, but when they return home to inject the zombies with it, they discover the poison is animal stimulants, which revives them. They narrowly escape the now-enhanced zombies, who burst into the house upstairs and slaughter all the party guests in their wake. The guests then subsequently transform into zombies and pour out of Montague Manor to start their rampage all over Fort Verona.
Only the Sheriff is able to escape the confusion unharmed when he catches Romeo and Juliet fleeing. As he savagely beats them up, the Sheriff reveals to Romeo and Juliet on how his father and her mother both actually died, sparking a family feud between the Capulets and Montagues in the process. When Juliet was a little girl, her mother, Gloria Capulet, had an affair with Romeo's father, Ted Montague, forcing Cappy to furiously drown them both to death in a bathtub. Realizing his father's murder at the hands of Cappy, Romeo bursts into tears to mourn his loss while Juliet spots a massive horde of zombies, led by Cappy, stampeding towards the trio, intrigued by this shouting match between the Sheriff and Romeo. This forces Juliet to flee back to Capulet Manor where the zombie outbreak started, with Romeo and the Sheriff in tow. There, Cappy regains his intelligence to communicate with Juliet once again. As Cappy and his zombies begin to corner Juliet, Romeo, and the Sheriff on the manor's rooftop, Juliet confronts her father to reveal what the Sheriff revealed to her and Romeo earlier, accusing him of lying to her the whole time. Enraged by Juliet's accusations of her mother's murder, Cappy tries to kill both her and Romeo, but Juliet takes the Sheriff's gun and shoots Cappy in the head before he can attack Romeo, finally killing him. As this happened, all of the zombies return to normal, and Fort Verona is saved. Juliet is soon hailed as a hero for stopping the city-wide zombie outbreak as both the Capulet and Montague families joyfully reconcile.
Sheriff Escalus was so impressed of Juliet's quick wits of being an expert on zombies, he soon pardons her of her crimes. Romeo then proposes to Juliet to marry him, which Juliet accepts, and she and Romeo marry after graduating from their school. The film ends with Romeo leading his rock band, "Blue Sky", to perform at his and Juliet's wedding and graduation party (with Romeo on guitar, Murray on bass, Juliet on keyboards, and Ben on drums).
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