Friday Firsts: Bad Taste

by Patrick Bromley

I miss Peter Jackson.

I think I was a freshman in high school the first time I saw Dead Alive (aka Braindead), which I blindly rented on a Saturday night with my one of my best friends Frank because we were both drawn in by the box art, the critic's quote promising "the goriest fright film of all time" and the fact that the movie was unrated, promising us we would see some shit. We were not disappointed. By the time the movie reached its insanely bloody climax, neither of us could believe what we were seeing. We laughed at every gore gag, floored by the movie's ability to top itself. It ended and something had chemically changed inside me. I had climbed my Everest and fallen in love with its peak. For years later, it was go-to movie when initiating friends -- if they could handle Dead Alive, I knew they were people I wanted to be around. To this day it remains one of the best horror comedies of all time and the best splatter movie every made, hands down.

It also introduced me to Peter Jackson, sending me down a rabbit hole to discover everything I could about the insane genius who had unleashed Lionel and Vera and the Sumatran rat monkey on the world. This was in the days before the internet, meaning I couldn't just Google him or type his name into IMDb. There weren't yet books written about him. What there was, if memory serves, was a brief mention in the pages of Premiere magazine talking about his next project (which would end up being Heavenly Creatures, though I'm not sure if that was mentioned by name or if my memory is playing tricks on me). This is where I learned about the likes of both Meet the Feebles and, more importantly, Bad Taste -- Jackson's debut feature and the subject of today's Friday First.

Filmed over the course of four years and finally released in 1987 (in New Zealand, anyway; the U.S. wouldn't get it until 1989), Bad Taste is written, produced, shot, edited and directed by Peter Jackson, who also plays two parts in the film: the hero Derek, who spends two-thirds of the movie trying to stuff his brains back into his skull, and Robert, one of the aliens who spends trying to eat brains out of skulls. It has the feel of a movie shot with friends in the backyard because that's pretty much what it is, but when the guy making a movie in his backyard would eventually go on to direct the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you know you're going to end up with something special. That's what Bad Taste is -- it's something special. I'm not positive it's a great movie, but it holds the promise of greatness. Maybe that's easier to see now that we know Jackson went on to realize that greatness (and then perhaps lose it), but it's on display all over Bad Taste. So much of what I would come to love about Jackson's work can be seen in his first film.

There's not so much a story as there is a premise: aliens have invaded a New Zealand town to harvest mankind for their own line of fast food. A government organization dispatches four agents to stop them, including Derek (Jackson), who takes a nasty fall off a cliff early on and is presumed dead by his friends.

Bad Taste is like a lot of first films from great directors: the ideas and the personality are there -- the filmmaker's DNA runs all the way through it -- even if the technique and execution are still really rough. It was true of Edgar Wright's first movie A Fistful of Fingers (the first Friday First column) just as it's true of Martin Scorsese's Who's That Knocking at My Door? and Wes Craven's Last House on the Left and Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It just as it's true here.

What Jackson starts here -- and what he would perfect just a few years later in Dead Alive -- seems so obvious that you can't believe no one had already done it, combining the insane gore of Herschell Gordon Lewis with the energy and humor of early Sam Raimi. To be fair, Jackson wasn't exactly the first, as there are elements of what he did in Bad Taste in everything from Basket Case to Re-Animator. He's not inventing splat-stick (a term I've heard credited to Jackson himself), but he's clearly on his way to perfecting it. There's something about gore that's completely outrageous that makes us laugh instinctively, either out of shock or as a way of protecting ourselves from our own fears of what can possibly be done to deface and dismember the human body. Conversely, the fact that so much of the violence is played for laughs makes it easier to accept. When a soldier tries stuffing his organs back into his body during the D-Day sequence of Saving Private Ryan, it's tragic and horrifying. When Derek continually shoves pieces of his brain back into his head or pushes down the flap of skull that keeps coming loose, it's hilarious. The tone of the approach is everything, and Jackson understands that to carve out his place as the master of this very specific and narrow subgenre he's got to push the humor of disgusting gore further than anyone.

While it may seem unlikely to draw a direct line between this low-budget homemade horror comedy and the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- one of the most sprawling and ambitious undertakings in movie history, deservedly rewarded with critical acclaim, a bunch of Oscars, massive box office and the endless adoration of fans everywhere -- there are indicators as far back as the mid-'80s as to who exactly Jackson is as a filmmaker. Take, for example, a shot in the first five minutes of the movie in which an alien is following a blonde-haired alien (the lower half of whose head can be seen above) who is chasing Barry (Pete O'Herne) across a hillside. The camera tracks behind them, then comes up over the alien's shoulder and over the roof of a shed and up into the air looking down over the hill, switching from handheld to a crane with a single hidden cut. It's an incredible shot for any filmmaker, much less a first-timer. More than that, though, is that it looks exactly like what Jackson would later do in Lord of the Rings: the immediacy of on-the-ground handheld photography combined with a loose arial style that makes the camera feel weightless -- it can go and float anywhere. It's further proof of just how formed Jackson's style is even this early on in his career.

There is a cleverness to Bad Taste that also marks Jackson's work. That might seem like an odd word to describe a film with this silly a plot, this many goofy jokes and exploding sheep, but that's all the kind of stuff that only works when made with intelligence. Truly dumb filmmakers can't do dumb well. In Bad Taste, the cleverness reveals itself in the timing and staging of the gags, or in the way Jackson fights himself early in the film (Derek versus Robert; bearded Jackson versus beardless Jackson) or in Jackson gets around having to build a spaceship on his budget by making the house the ship. Smart choices and clever staging would carry all the way through his LotR trilogy, which is maybe most clever for the way it blends CG and practical effects.

Speaking of effects, Jackson did a lot of them himself in Bad Taste and they're terrific. They have a homemade vibe, sure, but that's a big part of the charm. They all work, and it's a reminder that there was a long time when few filmmakers used effects better than Peter Jackson, whether it's the practical gore of his splatter films or the incredible puppetry of Meet the Feebles or the tasteful and restrained CG in Heavenly Creatures or the way he convincingly faked the old footage of Forgotten Silver (there's that cleverness again). His use of digital technology rivaled James Cameron's for a few films, and though his King Kong remake represents the turning point both in his filmography and in his sole reliance on computers, it still contains some of the best digital creations I've ever seen. It's just that there is so many of them that it becomes visual noise.

Which brings me to the question I've been trying to avoid: what happened? King Kong was over a decade ago now and is the last good movie we've had from Peter Jackson (and yes, I know many would disagree with me on even that point). He's been stuck in a Hobbit cage for the last four years and recently admitted that he made a lot of mistakes with the second trilogy, including breaking up one film into two to buy himself more time. Even before that, though, he made The Lovely Bones, as disastrous as big-budget Hollywood dramas get, though it is, in the words of Roger Ebert (referring to someone else) the kind of bad movie only a great filmmaker makes. Has his interest in pushing technology forward -- I'm looking at you, 48fps -- replaced his ability to tell a story? The blood in his movies -- not the blood on screen, but the life blood pumping through the films themselves -- has been replaced by 1s and 0s.

I've never missed Peter Jackson more than on this rewatch of Bad Taste, a charming and delightfully offbeat reminder not just of who PJ used to be as a filmmaker but of all the potential that once laid before him. Don't get me wrong; I would never argue that he did not reach that potential and make the most of it. But it feels now like his wax wings have long since melted, flop sweat accumulating movie after movie. I think we'll see him return to form someday. From spending four years making his first movie to tackling what is arguably the most ambitious film trilogy of all time, he's never been one to run from a challenge.

Derricks never run.