Bad Taste (1987)

 

Director: Peter Jackson

Screenplay: Peter Jackson, Tony Hiles and Ken Hammon

Cast: Terry Potter as Ozzy / 3rd Class Alien; Pete O'Herne as Barry / 3rd Class Alien; Peter Jackson as Derek / Robert; Mike Minett as Frank / 3rd Class Alien; Craig Smith as Giles Copeland/ 3rd Class Alien; Ken Hammon as 3rd Class Alien; Costa Botes as 3rd Class Alien; Doug Wren as Lord Crumb; Dean Lawrie as Lord Crumb SPFX double / 3rd Class Alien; Peter Vere-Jones as Lord Crumb's voice

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I'll have his head Reg. I want to suck his brains out.

Spare a thought for the poor bastards who do not work with large, well established groups who deal with extraterrestrial activity like the Men in Black or those who work out of Area 51. Middle America, full of UFO sightings, may either have a police force who are not taught to deal with such cases, or a small group of amateur or professional (but unfunded) specialists but at least can have a Mulder and Scully, or similar FBI agents, at hand. In Bad Taste, marking his first work in a career which would wildly spin out into ambition and legacy, Peter Jackson shows us that all New Zealand has at hand, whilst capable, is The Astro Investigation and Defence Service, a New Zealand group, who even have to put up with a name so politically incorrect even in 1987 when written as an acronym, let alone the fact they have only four members. Dealing with malevolent aliens rampaging around their beautiful but quaint countryside, the sick humour of the name is something to take their minds off said nasties terrifying the sheep and making whole towns of people disappear, and it says a lot about Bad Taste the film, living up to that title, that the only negative aspect to that name is the aforementioned acronym, whilst everything else in this film, when Jackson was entirely outside the film industry, is tasteless but aged well.

Unfortunately, finding the entirety of the population of Kaihoro missing, The Astro Investigation and Defence Service have to deal with aliens who want to use human beings as the main food supply for an intergalactic fast food franchise. Never has the terms ‘Heavy Users’ and ‘Super Heavy Users’, from the Morgan Spurlock documentary Super Size Me (2004), been as macabre as when you link them to the activities of the aliens in Bad Taste.  This is also of a type of alien invasion story far removed from even The War of the Worlds, where even if the Tripods invaded in Surrey, H.G. Welles' original novel still had an apocalyptic nature, whilst Bad Taste's humour, one of its many virtues, is embracing New Zealand as a nation and a Commonwealth country in its more mundane aspects. Only now is it dated that Queen Elizabeth II's portrait is onscreen in one of the first shots, and there are both Dr. Who references and a liberal (and specific use) of the term "bastard" throughout. The innocuous nature of Peter Jackson’s first three films – this, Meet The Feebles (1989), and Brain Dead [Dead Alive] (1992) – is a huge factor in why they are as memorable among other factors.

It is also hilarious to see New Zealand, before it was put on the map by the Lord of the Rings adaptations Jackson helmed, as interpreted here. We can imagine a young Peter Jackson, in his yellow/red knitted scarf as Derek, not despondent about the possibility of Oakland being wiped out by the invading aliens, filming in these locations and getting an inkling that Hobbits would not look out of place there for a J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation. Usually in alien invasion films everyone looks the glamorized version of what a normal person is, the settings metropolises (New York, Los Angeles) or cleaned up versions of places, and never would it be conceived that one of the main heroes, with an uzi in hand to take out the mindless hordes, would step in a patch of cow dung and slip like in this film. Bad Taste still has a final chapter that is an extended gun battle, but because of its low budget, its setting, and its jokey and naive tone, such images are pulled up into being inherently silly as well as gripping.

That the film is as much a comedy as well as horror, keeping in the boom of ‘splatterstick’ and horror-comedies made in the 1980s, enforces this as it never takes itself seriously. Sight gags, jokes against places within New Zealand, and aliens giving the heroes the middle finger during combat all pile up together in their frivolousness to create something inanely charming. The first three films of Jackson’s, even in the perversity of Meet The Feebles, were able to take such juvenile humour and ideas, and makes them into imaginative, amusingly inane but compelling areas. Brain Dead [Dead Alive] would succeed the most, as its 1950s setting and the era’s stereotypical stiltedness already brought a sense of naivety and innocence to the characters and interactions that were invaded by the bloodiest and graphically imaginative gore scenes you could see. That they are New Zealand films, part of the British Commonwealth, does have a lot to say; connections with the British and our use of our own inanity within our most surreal and disgusting jokes is matched by the utter amusement of how Jackson runs with the connections with the British Royalty and our culture within his country, just by the amount of times the late Queen or (then) Prince Charles’ faces appear in such a gory film.

The gore is the most distinctive aspects of Bad Taste, but the virtue of it and Brain Dead is that they are more just decapitations and blood effects continually repeated, but delve into a Carnivalesque mentality where the rules of human anatomy are destroyed as much as the prosthetic effects. Case in point would be the predicament that main character Derek (Jackson in one of two roles) has when his skull is broken and he is in constant danger of his brains falling out. The anatomy of the grey matter is slightly suspect even for my lack of medical knowledge, but the complete lack of rules is what makes the gorier sequences stand out. And it is not just these scenes too as, despite the low budgeted nature of the film, shades of the camera techniques Jackson would have in his later career and the Lord of the Rings trilogy can be seen in these origins, the elaborate movements at certain moments striking considering how difficult or time consuming some might have been to pull off. The attempts to play with the form of cinema in one’s debut, made over four years¹, can be seen and are the best virtues of the film, the piecemeal nature of this production length found in how the film's editing has to coordinate around Jackson himself playing two characters, Derek clean shaven and as one of the aliens with a full beard, let alone the production having to work around how the creators were complete outsiders to their film industry originally making this. This is a work, in terms of micro-budget and no-budget genre cinema, of a high bar, just for having to work around something obvious which could have undercut the film in continuity. Jackson even has the pair fight on top of a cliff just to toy with this, whether out of practicability or to see if he and the rest of the film production team could pull it off, the mirrored doppelganger effect a memorable and applaudable attempt even if it is obvious how they set the individual shots together to make it work.

The film's premise beyond this is obvious in mind to its limitations in cast and resources - one poor sod out for donations wanders into the town now without a population but flesh eating aliens, and the leads have to rescue him and stop the attempt at human fast food business. However, whether it is that they used their limited resources to even have Jackson head butt a fake seagull in a shot, or that this film's crude premise has its satire, particularly when their leader is (for all his praises of them) treats the group as minimal wage employees who can be disposed off, the film has a lot of whit to it to admire. Some aspects are just deliciously weird, like wondering where and how they found the "Magical Mystery Car", a Converted Ford Anglia Van designed to have cardboard cut-outs of the Beatles, from their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band era, seemingly driving the vehicle, which both a) has the imagine of Paul McCartney (et all) in a cameo in a splatter scene, but is funnier now knowing Jackson directed the documentary The Beatles: Get Back (2021).

Peter Jackson with Bad Taste clearly wanted to push himself with this film, and like the most well regarded genre films, the limitations cannot undermine this fact, especially when he went on to make Meet The Feebles and the masterpiece Brain Dead, and successfully raised the bar and made better films. That his legacy went further from this to Oscar awards and ambitious films are a really curious page in history, as arguably even among legendary cult directors who went into the mainstream, Jackson is a candidate for one of the most successful micro-budget genre filmmakers from that era. This sort of filmmaking leads to great reward for the makers and the viewers, and after writing that at 26 years old or so when covering this film once before in an amateur review, I can still say long afterwards that Bad Taste has probably made double the reward for itself every time I view it.

 

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1) Bad Taste, "a perspective" by Tony Hiles, published for NZ on Screen on 04/09/2013.