By Keri O’Shea
Alien invasions have taken many forms in film over the years; we’ve had bug-eyed Martians, super-intelligent hunters, sentient gloop, sentient gloop which becomes mass-marketed as a tasty snack, and many new arrivals – be they plant life or meteor-borne slugs, for instance – who have sought to take over the bodies of humans in as convincing a way as possible, to avoid detection for as long as possible. That isn’t quite how it goes in Bad Taste, the first feature-length movie from director Peter Jackson…
Aliens have landed in a sleepy small town in New Zealand, and so conspicuous are the boss-eyed, shambling xenomorphs who seem to have replaced the townsfolk there that, whether or not they’re clad inconspicuously in standard-issue blue denim, they’ve come to the attention of the government. Oh, that and the fact that all the usual inhabitants are still missing. That’s a whopping seventy-five people! Obviously, something has to be done about this. We’re made privy, at the start of the film, to the governmental decision-making on what to do about these “intergalactic wankers” and the powers-that-be are evidently deadly serious. That’s why they’re sending The Boys – otherwise known as the Astro Investigation and Defence Service. Yep, it’s a mnemonic to conjure with, and a crew to be feared. Sort of…
Meet Derek, Barry, Ozzy and Frank: they’re hardly the crack paramilitary team you might expect. Derek (played by Jackson himself) is a batty scientist who keeps birds; as for his colleagues, the kindest thing we could say about them is that they’re a band of likeable pillocks, bemused by their own incompetence a lot of the time, and the type of blokes you’d be shy of trusting with a shopping list, let alone saving the planet. The vicar who joins them, when he picks the wrong day to go door-to-door collecting for charity, isn’t a whole lot better. There’s something truly gleeful about watching this lot try to cope with the situation unfolding around them; it’s at the heart of Bad Taste’s slacker wit, that which has been imitated but never fully replicated elsewhere, because the New Zealand of the film’s setting is completely unique. The Kiwis I know insist that provincial NZ always feels like it’s a square twenty years behind the rest of the world; you see evidence of that in Bad Taste, where the slow pace of life has evidently passed on to its protagonists, come what may – and you’d think there’d be a bit more of a sense of alarm here than there is. Our AIDS guys deal with the potential end of life as we know it with very relaxed attitudes generally; in America, these guys would be self-consciously written as stoners or they’d be at the other end of the spectrum, action heroes; here, they’re neither of those things, they’re just achingly funny regular blokes doing their best, but occasionally sitting around and reading magazines while they wait to see what’ll happen. Course, these are still professionals: they can get it together when they really need to – and when they do, it often leads to copious gore.
If its sense of humour is a fundamental part of the film’s long-lasting charm, then the zany special effects in Bad Taste are a huge part of that – in fact, you really can’t divorce the two. From the outset, the blood and guts are totally over-the-top and absurd; we’re barely past the opening credits when we’ve seen an alien getting his head blown clean off, in a sequence which has aged pretty well and has in all likelihood influenced much later films, like Inbred, which uses a very similar scene. To quote Derek, “I pity the poor bastard that’s got to clean that up.” Bad Taste features gallons of the red stuff, limb removals, literal human(oid) shields, and brains which look a hell of a lot like blancmange – it’s all pretty full on, and more that, it’s seriously icky. The alien who loses the top of his head? Observe his buddy later eating the contents of his skull with a spoon. The film has a really infamous moment of ick, too: ask anyone what they remember most clearly from this film and I bet they’ll say ‘the gruel scene’: I re-watched the film before writing this feature, and the vision of one of the aliens vomiting blue liquid into a bowl which his cohorts then drink still makes me wince/laugh/wince, absolutely in that order. You can see the steam rising off it, for fuck’s sake! So, the grue definitely lends itself to giggles – such as pratfalls which crack heads open (and lead to novel uses for a belt) and human battering rams. Bad Taste gives us a uniquely daft brand of splatstick, and rather than body-horror, what we really have here is body-comedy. And it’s human bodies that figure highly on the agenda of the “extra-terrestrial low lifers” that have landed in Kaihoro. The crux of the plot – that these aliens are part of an intergalactic fast food company and they want to push homo sapiens as the hottest new meat on the menu – is a fun facet to the overall farce.
Considering how well the jokes land here, it’s astonishing really that this is a film that had no formal script: one of the reasons for this is that Peter Jackson – that’s the director, editor, photographer, writer, SFX guy and star, no less – took four years (and nearly exclusively his own cash) to get the film made, and so decided what he was going to shoot as he and his friends went along. It works remarkably bloody well; originally planned to be a short, Bad Taste ended up being the (demented) calling-card of a filmmaker who would go on to rather different fare, but not before he’d exercised his imagination on a couple more unselfconsciously wacky movies: Meet The Feebles (with the world’s first hippopotamus to pack lead, surely) appeared two years after Bad Taste, and then of course Jackson made a film that needs no introduction – the classic Braindead (or Dead Alive for US audiences), which is still probably the goriest film I’ve ever seen and one of the most stand-out zombie horror-comedies ever made.
After Jackson had impressed the New Zealand Film Commission with what he’d shot of Bad Taste when he was approaching the end of the project, finally securing finance to get the film finished, it’s fair to say Jackson’s career hasn’t been so much an arc as a vertical line, at least in terms of locations, commercial viability and of course, budgets (not to mention film length). It’s hard to believe that the same filmmaker who was drop-kicking human heads in Bad Taste could go on to an epic project like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I’m sure Jackson himself looks at his filmography and scratches his head from time to time, but there’s a demented energy to his earliest films (and certainly his forays into horror/sci-fi) which means they definitely retain their charm. The grim determination it took Jackson to get his first feature done is a testament to the radically-different works which would follow, too, as it showed someone who was totally committed to the craft, and would do it their own way, whether the vision be of brains leaking out of the back of someone’s head or something a tad more sophisticated, y’know, like Mordor…
Wherever you stand on Jackson’s later films, there’s still so much to love about the imaginative, spontaneous approach Jackson was taking at the beginning of his career; apart from the fact that, for good or ill, the appearance of this lo-fi project probably inspired countless filmmakers to just get out there and make their own damn movie, Bad Taste remains a seriously entertaining cult classic, beloved by fans. Razor sharp, eye-poppingly grisly and laugh-out-loud funny, there’s nothing quite like it out there – there wasn’t before it, and there hasn’t been since. And who knows? It’s always open for a follow-up, if Mr. Jackson tires of his glittering Hollywood career and wants to swap back dazzling CGI for rubber masks. Until such time as that eventuality though, happy 25th birthday, Bad Taste! And let us all remember, as if we could ever forget the fact, that Dereks Don’t Run.