BAD TASTE (1987) Peter Jackson's directorial debut.

DIRECTED By Peter Jackson.

SCREENPLAY By Peter Jackson, Tony Hiles & Ken Hammon.

STARRING  - Terry Potter as Ozzy/Alien,  Peter O' Herne as Barry/Alien,  Peter Jackson as Derek/Robert,  Mike Minett as Frank/Alien,  Craig Smith as Giles Copeland/Alien,  Ken Hammon as Alien,  Costa Botes as Alien,  Doug Wren as Lord Crumb,  Dean Lawrie as Lord Crumb SPFX double,  Peter Vere Jones as Lord Crumb's voice.

PLOT - The boys from the Astro Investigation and Defense Service (A.I.D.S.), a crack commando squad who investigate extra terrestrial phenomena, are assigned to investigate the disappearance of the population of an entire town, Kaihoro in the wilderness of New Zealand.

Upon arriving at the town, the Boys (Frank, Ozzy, Barry and scientific adviser Derek) find that the town has been overrun by cannibalistic aliens disguised as humans. After capturing one of the aliens, Robert, Derek starts to snap and begins torturing him. Derek and Robert fight and in the process Derek falls off a cliff and smashes his head open.

Meanwhile, a charity collecter, Giles arrives in town. Giles is captured by the aliens and put in a cooking pot to be eaten at a later date.

Infiltrating the house, the boys rescue Giles and find that the aliens are actually workers for an intergalactic fast food corporation run by the evil Lord Crumb. Human meat is the latest taste sensation in the outer galaxies and Lord Crumb wants to set up operations on Earth to corner the market. The boys realise that Crumb must be stopped before planet Earth is turned into a meat farm, but little do they know that Derek is not dead, he survived his fall, and now insane and brain damaged, he's about to go on a chainsaw rampage...

DIALOUGE  - Derek - "There's no glowing fingers on these bastards, we've got a bunch of extra-terrestrial psychopaths on our hands."

PERFORMANCES - Generally, I find that there tends to be four types of bad acting in movies. Type one is when you get a bunch of perfectly competent actors being bored by a script or unhappy with the shoot and just "phoning in" thier performance as a result. Leading to a bored seeming and usually boring to watch performance. Type two is deliberate bad acting. This usually occurs when a script requires actors to go completely O.T.T. and ham it up deliberately. This can be quite fun and amusing to watch mostly. Type three is just sheer truly bad acting. Where the cast are non actors and give wooden unwatchable performances. Then you get type four...

Type four is when you get a bunch of amateur actors, who can't actually act in the conventional sense of the word, but who are so exuberant and happy  to be appearing in a film that they give it thier all and win over the audience on sheer charm alone. The actors are having fun and so does the audience. Bad Taste, I'm pleased to say, is a "type four" movie through and through.

Bad Taste is the first film to be written and directed by Peter Jackson, a man who would rise above the humble beginnings that we see here and would eventually go on to direct the Hollywood blockbusting Lord Of The Rings trilogy of movies among other things. Bad Taste was shot over a period of four years, mostly at weekends, by Jackson and a small group of friends. The cast and crew where so small that every actor plays multiple roles - the main characters and also donning wigs to play the aliens in human form. You can see at several points the cast doubling up and this only adds to the charm of this micro budgeted homemade movie.

Because that's exactly what Bad Taste is. It's a homemade movie lovingly crafted by a bunch of mates arsing about with cameras on thier weekends off. It's this sheer sense of fun, that this bunch of mates are having a laugh, that helps smooth over the rough edges of the amateur acting.  We have Mike Minett as Frank, leader of the Boys who gets to have big shoot outs and drink alien vomit at one point. Terry Potter plays Ozzy, the gun toting Rambo wannabe of the group. Then we get Peter O' Herne as Barry, the quieter more contemplative member of the team. Craig Smith plays Giles, the human hostage the aliens have taken, he gets to spend a lot of the movie tied up in a cooking pot with an apple stuffed in his mouth.

Finally we get Peter Jackson himself playing Derek, the scientific adviser who takes a tumble off a cliff and dashes his brains out on the rocks below. Derek survives, scoops his brains up and pops them back into his head and then ties a belt round his head to keep his brains from oozing out of his cracked skull. He then goes crazy and starts chainsawing aliens to bits. Jackson also plays Robert, Lord Crumb's personal assistant in a similarly deranged manner. Jackson even gets to have a fight with himself, when Derek and Robert engage in a cliff top punch up.

Rounding out the cast we get Doug Wren playing Lord Crumb, the alien businessman who wants to turn the human race into fast food burgers. His voice is dubbed by Peter Vere Jones as I believe Wren passed away before the audio mixing could be completed. Needless to say Crumb is a great villain and Wren plays the character with a glint in his eyes. As with everyone else in the film he was clearly having a great time making this strange, gross and charming little movie.

The cast also double up as the film crew. Upon watching the end credits you can see the same four or five names keep cropping up as camera assistants, film editors, sound direction etc. Mike Minett even sings the song that plays as the end credits roll. This film was a truly collaborative effort on all sides, both in front of and behind the cameras.

SFX  - The home made aesthetic extends to the special effects too. The masks for the alien's heads in thier natural forms where all sculpted by Jackson himself and baked in his mother's oven. For such low-fi effects, the alien masks work really well. Jackson managed to imbue some kind of animatronics into the faces, so that the alien's facial expressions change when they speak.  This makes them seem much more convincing and "alive" than they have any right to be.

I also like the design of the aliens. They look like shaved baboons as they shamble about with thier big fat alien arses hanging out of thier ripped clothing...

SEX & VIOLENCE  - Bad Taste is a very gory film, so much so that it was actually banned in several countries back in the 80's. Alien heads get shot in half...

Brains get scooped out and eaten...

Limbs get lopped off, blood squelches and splatters all over the screen...

You get gun battles, punch ups, by the end of the film nearly everyone has been drenched in blood and vomit of some description. Lord Crumb gets chainsawed to bits as Derek climbs through his body head first and saws through his body before coming out of Crumb's backside. A sheep gets blown up with a rocket launcher. It's all completely O.T.T but in a good way. Its slapstick gore and not to be taken remotely seriously.

RATING  - Bad Taste is one of those films that demonstrates what can be achieved with a miniscule budget and a lot of enthusiasm, skill and imagination. Its no wonder that Jackson went on to bigger, better and more epic things.

Back in my University days, me and my friends used to borrow the Uni's cameras and make short, guerilla style films in which we all acted and all shot and edited together. It was a lot of fun and one of those things that I look back on with affection nearly thirty years later. Bad Taste is that style of no budget, homemade and hands on filmmaking writ large. Sadly, my friends and I never got to make anything longer than half hour shorts, we wanted to, but Uni ended and life got in the way. We went our separate ways and paying the bills became more important than living out our dreams. I'm glad Peter Jackson and his friends got to live out thiers. Bad Taste shows that it can be done and that it can be done well. I'm giving this 5 vomit drinking aliens out of 5. A micro budget classic.