Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987)

Every filmmaking machine has to be turned on at some point, perhaps before its output is of epic proportions. Such is the case with kiwi Peter Jackson and his string of splatter fest films through the late 80’s and early 90’s. This particular film is his first feature, taking four years to produce, and was filmed without sync sound, a finished script, actresses, or real guns.

The finished film is almost textbook bad, if only moderately bad taste. Filmed only on weekends, the elements to be filmed had only come to mind in the previous week. This makes the film feel, and I will of course give it a lot of slack, a bit disjointed and at times episodic; one scene to the next is joined by blurred connections. But all this hardly matter in relation to the on-screen events and shear audacity of the filmmaker and his devoted crew.

My favorite part is when a guy cuts a hole in the floor with a chainsaw and dives through it onto an alien and cuts his way through the top of the alien’s head and out the bottom, wiggling his way to the floor as his feet disappear through the alien’s mutilated face. And this is only one of the countless examples of gratuitously ingenious and comically headshaking carnage dished out on the invading aliens whose only goal is the strip humans of their fat and ship the rest of the meat back to the home planet in cardboard boxes. Of course, for much of the movies the aliens take on human form and stumble through the New Zealand landscape in search of humans to eat.

Bad Taste, despite it consistently creative disemboweling endeavors, becomes a bit taxing to view. All manner of weaponry reap harvest on the cranium and trails of blood and guts must have polka-dotted the entire island. The novice construction, and obvious and confirmed lack of direction, make the narrative (albeit just an excuse for some splatter effects) unbearable and purposefully laughable. This film, besides being a creative stepping-stone and experiment, is basically an excuse to kill aliens in ways that have always just been talked about. I will not use the term endearing, but there is something quaint about this film having been spawned by the peaceful kiwi country and helmed by a man whose fame comes from films that bear little resemblance to this one.