Bad Taste |
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 • New Zealand • 1987 • 91m •   • Directed by: Peter Jackson. • Starring: Terry Potter, Pete O'Herne, Craig Smith, Mike Minett, Peter Jackson, Doug Wren, Dean Lawrie, Peter Vere-Jones, Ken Hammon, Robin Griggs, Michael Gooch, Peter Gooch, Laurie Yarrall. • Music by: Michelle Scullion, Jay Snowfield.      A team from the intergalactic fast food chain Crumb's Crunchy Delights descends on Earth, planning to make human flesh the newest taste sensation. After they wipe out the New Zealand town Kaihoro, the country's Astro-Investigation and Defense Service is called in to deal with the problem. Things are complicated due to Giles, an aid worker who comes to Kaihoro the same day to collect change from the residents. He is captured by the aliens, and AIaDS stages a rescue mission that quickly becomes an all-out assault on the aliens' headquarters.
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Review:
Jackson's first feature was Bad Taste, a low, low-budget horror comedy movie made over two years about aliens killing humans for their fast-food business back in space. No real plot, no real actors, no real crew. Only an insane imagination and devoted friends willing to help out. There's not even much of a script, because what Jackson sets out to do is sicken his audience with some of the most gruesome deaths ever seen and make them laugh until the back of their heads fall off. And he succeeds.
Narrative and plot structure are not on the vile menu here. Instead, Bad Taste is a testament to sick jokes, low-budget gore and technical brilliance on a shoestring. Jackson made his own steadicam, crane and other camera rigs to create the impression of a bigger-budgeted movie (he fails to do so, unfortunately) and even undertook the task of making all of his own make-up and prosthetic effects, including mechanised masks and realistic machine guns. This is an even greater achievement when you consider just how much gore there is in the film, but the finale, in which a huge mansion is rocketed into space, defies the rules of its low budget and minimal crew.
Even the cast were so minimal that the same aliens can be seen, if you look hard enough, being killed over and over again throughout the film, and Jackson himself takes on two roles; the unstable Derek and a mad alien called Robert. In one scene, Derek and Robert engage in a cliff-top fight with each other, balanced precariously on the edge and with no indication that one is a body double. Jackson's creativity and knowledge of movie trickery is undoubtedly on display here, but the low-rent sickness and bloody gore on display would suggest otherwise. At first it is hard to imagine that Jackson would go on from this to directing one of the best films of all time, but when you look closely, examine just what Jackson could do with no money and no crew, you begin to realise that a true genius was at work here.
Bad Taste is a delirious testament to the 'just-get-out-there-and-do-it' school of film-making, as that is literally what Jackson did. Shooting whenever he had the money for film stock and making props and special effects in his parent's garage. Apparently, one of Jackson's greatest problems was keeping his actors consistent in appearance over the two-year period, making sure haircuts remained the same and that one actor had a permanent five-o'clock shadow. Bad Taste is true to the spirit of independent film-making, one man making the film he wants, when he wants and with whom he wants. In fact, it would never and could never have been made under the supervision of a studio, and even if it had the spirit would have been killed off.
Bad Taste works for me because I admire the way in which it is made. When I first saw it I was in my teens and I liked it because it was a demented, gruesome, funny film, so maybe the teen crowd is the right one for Jackson's brain-eating, vomit-spewing, chuck-up-a-thon, or maybe it's also for twenty-somethings after a night on the lash. Either way, Bad Taste should be seen as an example that if you want to make a movie and know how - there is usually a way.
Review by captain_bungle from the Internet Movie Database.
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