“Aren’t I lucky, I got a chunky bit!”
Long before Peter Jackson became the guy who directed The Lord of the Rings films, he could be found making exquisitely campy and violent genre movies (Braindead, AKA Dead Alive is definitely worth checking out if you dig his debut). His first one, Bad Taste, is a sci-fi horror film in which cannibalistic aliens harvest human flesh for an intergalactic fast food chain. It’s a splatter-comedy through-and-through, featuring cheap, practical, and absurdly excessive gore. Jackson himself serves as director, producer, screenwriter, makeup artist, effects specialist, prop designer—and portrays two main characters. He used this low-budget bloodbath to showcase his various skills and was successful enough to get his foot in the door of the industry. It requires very loose definitions of “good” and “bad” to deem Bad Taste anything but the latter, but it’s hard not to love the gumption of a young filmmaker getting out there with his friends and alien costumes to toss around some lead and chicken guts.
It’s probably obligatory to make the joke that Peter Jackson literally loses his mind over the course of Bad Taste. His character, Derek, spends the majority of the film shooting and slicing his way through the alien horde while his brain oozes out of the back of his cracked skull. After splitting his noggin during a tumble down a cliff, he finds a hunk of brain laying loosey-goosey on the rocks. He picks it up and jams it back into the crack through which it fell. He holds the skull fragment in place with his hand at first, but then he finds a hat to hold things together, and later uses a belt. It’s a gross, repeated gag that is punctuated by Derek adding a hunk of alien brain to his own. Bad Taste revels in that kind of juvenile nastiness with an endearing sense of playfulness.
The jocular, trigger-happy tone is set in the opening scene. Derek’s mulletted squad, known as The Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS), is sent to investigate the butchering of a small seaside town. Barry (Pete O’Herne) shoots one of the humanoid creatures and ends up showered with gore. Meanwhile, Derek, who is supervising from a clifftop perch, begins torturing a captured alien named Robert (also Jackson) whose screams attract a horde of his buddies. Thus begins a series of largely improvised firefights and moments of gross-out humor that is seldom if ever serious but was surely lots of fun to make. It goes for broke on the shock-horror scale, though it’s too childish to ever become scary or disgusting. Instead, you’ll be more inclined to laugh as eyeballs pop out, bird poop lands on faces, humans drink alien vomit, a now-infamous sheep gets hit by an RPG, and a young Peter Jackson chainsaws his way vertically through Lord Crumb—down through the head and out between the legs—then dons his alien skin as a disguise.
Filmed on weekends over the course of four years and funded by Jackson’s gig as a photo engraver, Bad Taste stars his friends as the most stoic action heroes of all time. Nonchalantly mowing down aliens, barely registering the machine gun fire spraying around their feet, their potential fate as alien burgers seems not to bother them too much. This form of non-acting precludes any chance at action sequences with weight to them, but it kind of works for Jackson’s brand of amateur slapstick.
The best moments of Bad Taste are when it is at its most visually iconic. The quick shot of the sheep before it explodes into a mist of blood and bone, Peter Jackson eating brains with a spoon, charity collector Giles (Craig Smith) gagged with an apple and floating in vegetable broth, the costumes of Lord Crumb and his underlings. The common element of all of those moments is that they involve Jackson’s passionate commitment to outlandish practical effects. For a guy just trying to make things work with barely any money, his dedication, resourcefulness, and hilariously gross results are commendable. I mean, this dude forced his own mother out of her kitchen so he could take over the oven for curing alien masks. That’s passion!
Using a single, dated camera rig, Jackson devised a setup that allowed him to do crane shots and other maneuvers to mimic the studio-backed hotshots. He even built his own Steadicam that cost him a fraction of the price of a new one. Though it is easily lost amidst the overbearing effects, the camera work deserves some attention. In conjunction with his shot selection, Jackson also showed an impressive ability to storyboard and coordinate a scene. There’s one in particular, in which the two characters Jackson is portraying engage in fisticuffs that is technically impressive. Even just getting the beats and editing right for a choreographed fistfight is hard enough, but Jackson had to do so while playing both of the characters himself! Super impressive for a dude that was still getting his feet under him. (It should be noted in passing that Peter Jackson looks way better with a beard than without one.)
It’s really amazing what Jackson was able to accomplish with such limited resources. It’s maybe passably good if you squint hard enough, but it’s true appeal lies in its get-it-done attitude. No mainstream studio would ever greenlight something as inane as Bad Taste, so for Jackson to get out there and make a movie on his own terms with no visual effects, no professional cast, no budget—you can’t help but smile at the peculiarity he created. It’s hard to imagine this dorky mastermind would go on to helm one of the most ambitious film trilogies of modern times, but we all gotta start somewhere. You can find the initial traces of some of his later hallmarks—miniature sets, trickery with perspective, monsters, etc. While there’s a lot to love about Bad Taste, it’s likely only for genre enthusiasts or fans of truly independent cinema.
Sources:
“How Peter Jackson Made a Splatter Masterpiece”. Youtube, The Royal Ocean Film Society. 28 August 2020.