Bad Taste: Peter Jackson's Alien-Splatter Debut

There is a particular pleasure in watching a film that should not exist, and Bad Taste is the purest example I know. Peter Jackson made it over roughly four years of weekends, starting in 1983, with a wind-up 16mm Bolex, a group of friends who were not actors, and a stretch of coastline near Pukerua Bay that he could film on because nobody was using it. He was working at a Wellington newspaper as a photo-engraver during the week. He built the effects himself, some of them in his mother’s kitchen, and his mother fed the crew. The New Zealand Film Commission eventually put money in to finish the thing — to blow it up to 35mm and give it a proper soundtrack — and it went to the Cannes market in 1988, where it sold.

I came to it on a battered tape, well after the fact, at the age when you rent things because the cover looks like a dare. What I expected was an amateur curiosity. What I got was a film with a genuinely sophisticated understanding of its own limitations, made by someone who had clearly thought very hard about what a camera can be made to do for free.

The setup

The population of the small town of Kaihoro has vanished. The Astro Investigation and Defence Service sends four operatives to find out why. The answer, established early and cheerfully, is aliens: they are harvesting human beings as meat for an intergalactic fast-food franchise, and New Zealand looked like a soft launch market. Jackson plays Derek, the team’s least stable member, and also plays Robert, one of the aliens, because the crew was four people and somebody had to.

That is the whole premise, and the film tells you within ten minutes. Jackson’s interest is escalation. He starts escalating immediately.

The economics are the aesthetic

The most useful thing about Bad Taste is how legible its constraints are. There is no sync sound, because a Bolex does not record any — the entire film is dubbed in post, which is why the dialogue has that faintly detached, slightly-too-clean quality, as though the characters are being ventriloquised from another room. Jackson turns that into a joke. The performances are already broad; the dubbing pushes them into a register somewhere near a badly localised cartoon, and the film simply commits to it.

The camera does the same trick. A Bolex runs for about thirty seconds on a wind, which means every shot has a hard ceiling, which means the film is cut fast because it could not be cut slowly. Jackson learned to build sequences out of short, decisive fragments, and the result is a picture with more kinetic energy than films made for a hundred times the money. He also built his own rigs — including a hand-made camera mount for the running shots — because renting one was never going to happen.

The gore follows the same logic. Everything is latex, foam, offal, and a great deal of green fluid, and it is shot in bright New Zealand daylight, which is the boldest choice in the film. Cheap effects are traditionally hidden in gloom. Jackson puts his on a sunny clifftop at midday and dares you to look. It works because the material is genuinely well made, and because the film’s comic register makes the seams part of the gag. You are meant to see the rubber. The rubber is doing a bit.

Why it works: the belt

The film’s most famous image is its thesis. Derek goes off a cliff, and a section of his skull comes away, and rather than dying he collects his own brain, puts it back, and straps his head shut with a belt for the rest of the picture. He then spends the remainder of the film periodically losing bits of it and stuffing them back in, and getting steadily more unhinged, and never once treating any of this as unusual.

Look at how the gag is built. It is a single practical effect — a prosthetic skull-plate — that Jackson gets an entire second half of a film out of, because he made it load-bearing. It changes the character’s behaviour, it generates new jokes every time it appears, and it gives the actor a physical performance to play. A more expensive film would have used the effect once, in a money shot, and moved on. Jackson had one good prosthetic, so he wrote a character around it.

The film’s other signature set piece works on the same principle. The four operatives are required, for reasons of infiltration, to drink from a bowl of alien vomit, and Jackson shoots the scene as an agonising round of hospitality — the bowl going politely from hand to hand, each man swallowing and passing it on, the camera in no hurry whatsoever. It is a gross-out gag built entirely out of manners. The horror is social. Nobody wants to be rude.

This is the discipline that separates Bad Taste from the enormous pile of amateur splatter it superficially resembles. Jackson is filming consequences. Every injury in the picture persists — characters carry their damage forward, accumulate it, work around it. That is a screenwriting instinct, and he had it before he had a budget. You can watch him refine the same instinct across Meet the Feebles and then perfect it in Braindead, where an entire film is built from injuries that refuse to be over.

There is also a real argument buried in the framing. The team’s employer is the Astro Investigation and Defence Service, and Jackson lets the acronym sit there in 1987 without comment, which tells you what kind of film this is going to be about tact. The government response to an alien meat-harvesting operation consists of four men in a Mini with a shotgun and a persistent inability to agree on anything. The state, in Bad Taste, is four blokes and a rocket launcher one of them has stolen. That is the joke about a small country’s defence capability, and it is delivered with a completely straight face.

The real ancestor

Everyone reaches for The Evil Dead, and the comparison is fair enough on the surface — young man, friends, forest, camera, gore. It also explains almost nothing about Bad Taste, because Raimi was making a horror film that happened to be funny, and Jackson is making a comedy that happens to be revolting.

The truer parent is Herschell Gordon Lewis, and specifically Two Thousand Maniacs! from 1964. Look at the shape: a small rural town, a set of outsiders who arrive from elsewhere, and the discovery that the locals intend to eat them. Lewis shot it in a real Florida town with people who lived there, in daylight, with home-made gore, and then sold it himself on the drive-in circuit because no distributor wanted it. That is Jackson’s entire model, twenty years early and eleven thousand miles away. The regional splatter picture has always been made by someone who could not get to the industry, so they built a small one out of whatever was to hand — a location they had access to, friends who would show up, and effects they could cook.

Bad Taste belongs to that tradition rather than to the American independent horror boom, and it clarifies the film to say so. The joke about aliens farming New Zealanders for fast food is a joke about being from a country the rest of the world regards as raw material. Lewis’s Southerners eat Yankees for the same structural reason. Both films are regional cinema wearing a splatter costume, and both are funnier and angrier than their reputations allow.

The case against

It is too long by a reel, and the sag is in the middle, where Jackson has established his world and has not yet worked out how to end it. There is a stretch around the house siege where the film starts repeating its own rhythms, and you become aware of the four-year shoot in a way you were not before — the cast visibly ages, the light changes, the momentum stalls.

The four-year shoot leaves other marks. Continuity is approximate throughout — haircuts drift, weather changes inside a single scene, and one sequence will be overcast on a shot-reverse-shot that started in sun. Some of this is charming. Some of it genuinely damages a set piece, because a chase reads as a chase only if the sky agrees with itself. The Film Commission money that arrived at the end bought a 35mm blow-up and a soundtrack; it could not buy back the light.

The other honest complaint is that the comedy is one note played very hard. Jackson’s register in 1987 is pure escalation: whatever just happened, something more disgusting will happen shortly. That is delightful for fifty minutes and slightly wearing at ninety, and the film has no gear other than up. Braindead solves this by giving the gore a plot to serve. Bad Taste has a premise and a great deal of nerve.

The verdict

It is the most instructive debut in the genre, and I would put it in front of anyone who thinks they need money to start. Jackson had a camera that ran for thirty seconds, no sound, no cast and no permission, and he made a film with real formal intelligence out of exactly those facts. The gore has aged well for the reason hand-built gore always ages well — it was physically present in the same sunlight as the actors, so time has nothing to expose.

Watch it with Two Thousand Maniacs! for the lineage. Or watch it against The Quiet Earth, made two years earlier, for the strange fact that New Zealand produced, almost simultaneously, the most elegant end-of-the-world film of the decade and the most disgusting one. It is available restored, and the restoration is worth seeking out, because the clifftop daylight is the whole trick and it needs the resolution.

Spoilers below

The ending commits harder than anything before it. The alien farmhouse turns out to be a spacecraft, and it launches — Jackson gets a rocket departure out of a real house and some very economical effects work, and it plays. Derek, meanwhile, has been swallowed by Lord Crumb, and cuts his way out from the inside with a chainsaw, up and through, emerging from the top of the alien leader’s head.

Then he rides the departing ship off the planet, chainsaw running, announcing that he is coming with them. There is no rescue and no cavalry. The last image of the film is its most demented character choosing to be carried into deep space by the enemy, purely to keep hurting them.

It is a perfect ending for the film’s argument, which is that Derek was always the most dangerous thing in Kaihoro. The aliens came to harvest a quiet country town and picked up something with a belt around its head that will not stop. Jackson is playing both parts in that final confrontation, cutting himself out of himself, which is either an accident of a four-person crew or the most honest self-portrait a debut has ever produced.