Bad Taste

(1987) dir. Peter Jackson
viewed: 01/13/08

For some time, I’d intended on watching Peter Jackson’s first feature film, Bad Taste.  More noted for his Lord of the Rings films, Jackson first came to my attention when his film Dead-Alive (1992) became the cult video rental of its day.  I’d always considered it a bit of Aussie Evil Dead II (1987), possibly the originator of the combination of horror gore films and slap-stick comedy.  Whereas I found and still find Evil Dead II a pretty amazing film, I’ve been meaning to revisit Dead-Alive to see what I’d think of it now.  Clearly, Jackson has moved on, no more goofy horror films for him.

Bad Taste, at least from the poster/DVD cover, featuring an ugly alien giving the finger, really…I don’t know, I guess I sort of assumed that the aliens would be all over the film.  But as it turns out, this low-low budget film, which apparently Jackson shot over a few years on 16mm, really started out a bit more like a zombie film, or at least a cannibal film.

In a small village in New Zealand, a goofy team of government researchers (who seem a lot more like the drinking buddies of Jackson’s who probably the actors were), uncover a group of ferocious semi-zombie people who seem to be cannibals.  The team crashes the house to find out that the zombies are actually aliens in human form there to reap a human harvest for feeding fast food in outer space.  Hey, it’s a funny enough concept.

There is a lot of goofy action, comical though gory violence, with lots of red Karo syrup-spewing wounds.  The characters are all pretty silly, in a variety of ways.  The whole thing is comic and goofy.

And it’s pretty good fun.  It’s not incredibly amazing, but for the type of low-budget, DIY horror feature film making, it’s a decent accomplishment.  It actually made me think of a film made locally in Gainesville, FL back in the late 1980′s, Charles Pinion’s Twisted Issues (1988) which I think I tended to take for granted at the time, but realize that it was, even on video, walking a line of DIY filmmaking that really had some merits.  Also, bloody and silly, it’s not incredibly far off of this in its way.  Though, I would say, Jackson was very ambitious with effects, pulling off stuff that while not brilliant, was clearly clever because of the budget constraints.

I don’t think that Jackson is one of the great directors of our time.  I do think he did a good job with the Lord of the Rings series and I’ve liked some of his other films.  This, his earliest work, has character, which is more than one can say about a lot of things.