Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987) wr. dp ed. Peter Jackson; Terry Potter, Pete O'Herne, Craig Smith, Mike Minett, Peter Jackson; NZ; zomcom; 94 min.
Four agents from the Alien Invader Destruction Service try to stop aliens who are packaging the inhabitants of a small New Zealand town as intergalactic fast-food.
Bad Taste was New Zealand’s genuine homegrown cult splatter film and of course the film that announced the genius of Peter Jackson to the rest of the world. Bad Taste was made on a budget of about only the smell of two used shoestrings and shot on weekends over a period of four years virtually single-handed by Jackson who brought a Bolex and learned how to make films by reading Cinefex magazine. This is filmmaking as a work of fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants ingenuity – Jackson created all the makeup effects himself in his own home, even hand-carving the machine-guns when New Zealand gun control laws would not allow him to use real semi-automatic rifles. Due to the vagaries of amateur cast members not turning up, Jackson ended up playing two of the cast himself (one ingenious scene requires one character he is playing to hack apart the other while tied upside down on a cliffside).
The premiere of Bad Taste in New Zealand in 1988 was to watch a cult phenomenon unfolding before one’s eyes. Scripting seems an afterthought, probably more due to the haphazard nature of filming. The times the film stops to deliver dialogue are its most absurd, while the dialogue-based jokes thrown at Nuclear-Free NZ and the North Island/South Island disparities fall flat. Moria: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review.
Garry Gillard | New: 26 June, 2020 | Now: 26 June, 2020