Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Terry Potter, Pete O’Herne, Peter Jackson, Mike Minett, Craig Smith
When you are serious about following a particular actor or director’s career, it’s absolutely imperative to go back to the very beginning, to the film that started them on the path which led them to wide recognition and acclaim. Most filmmakers don’t knock it out of the park their first time at bat, but there are still hints that something special was on the horizon. In 1987, Peter Jackson was still a long way away from bringing to life the amazing world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. However, at least in hindsight, it is clear from the outside-the-box thinking it took to come up with Bad Taste that there was already a creative genius at work.
The premise of Bad Taste is that aliens disguised as humans dressed in blue shirts have landed on Earth with the intent of turning us into a sort of fast food. Our only hope appears to be a ragtag group of New Zealanders who work for an agency called the Astro Investigation and Defence Service. If you break that down to its acronym, then you’ll already know why the group is seriously thinking there should be a name change. The town of Kaihoro is completely empty, its inhabitants all having been captured, turned into fast food and stored in boxes inside the aliens’ house/mothership.
Pretty much everyone who appears in the film plays dual roles, but by far the most interesting character in Bad Taste is Derek. He is played by none other than Peter Jackson himself. The other agents think of Derek as somewhat nerdy, but his personality takes a sharp turn towards insanity after a run-in with an alien named Robert (also played by Peter Jackson). Derek at first toys with Robert, but is ambushed by some of Robert’s friends. Ultimately, Derek falls off a cliff and appears to plummet towards his (very) bloody demise. We later see that Derek is not yet bereft of life but has cracked open his skull. This leads to several scenes of humor where Derek is seen having to use first a hat and then a belt to hold what remains of his brains inside his skull.
Driving a car with cardboard cutouts of the Beatles from the “Sgt. Pepper” era displayed up front, Derek is a little late to the party when his friends launch their assault on the aliens’ house. However, that does not mean he isn’t prepared for a fight, ramping up his already playfully violent nature to a whole new level of grotesque. His primary weapon of choice becomes a chainsaw, which he uses to bisect, dismember and turn inside out several of the aliens, including the alien leader. But perhaps the greatest single moment of Bad Taste is reserved for when Derek narrowly dodges a shot fired from a rocket launcher meant to hit one of the aliens. The rocket flies through the human-shaped hole Derek has just cut into the front door and hits/blows up a sheep grazing out in the fields. It’s the sort of humorous bit of random mayhem you’d expect from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to which this and other scenes are no doubt an intentional nod.
Bad Taste has an almost student film kind of feel to it, which is owed to the limited budget with which the film was put together, as well as the 16mm camera on which it was shot. It took several years to complete, with Peter Jackson serving not only as one of its stars but also as director, producer, writer, cinematographer, editor, and he was even in charge of the special makeup effects. The result was a bloody insane horror comedy that kick started a terrific directorial career, made possible one of the greatest cinematic trilogies of all-time, and holds up pretty well as a piece of turn-your-brain-off entertainment.
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