Bad Taste (1989)

This movie is stupid. The worst part is that it's just so boring. They couldn't even make blood spurt in the right direction. The house being the space ship was stolen from Rocky Horror Picture Show. FAIL.

Peter Jackson is now known as an Oscar winning director for his great efforts on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, Peter Jackson didn't always produce high budget epics. He started with low budget films, the first of which was the 1987 horror comedy Bad Taste.The story features a group of boys who have to stop evil aliens from harvesting people into food. It's a simple premise done with a low budget and loads and loads of gore. The film is so gory I wouldn't recommend this film for the squeamish. However, if you're like me you'll be laughing at how over the top the violence gets at points. It's not realistic in the slightest and that's why it's so appealing.Peter Jackson had a hard time selling the splatter movie to the New Zealand Film Commission but he managed and now it's become a cult hit. This film combines horror, action and comedy into a consistently entertaining film. You can clearly tell Peter Jackson and his friends had a blast making Bad Taste and the energy and passion is all evident on screen. Bad Taste definitely lives up the title, it's gross and ridiculously funny at the same time. It was a great start for a filmmaker who went onto bigger things… but I'll always have a soft spot for his schlocky yet fun low budget films.

Shot on a shoestring-budget, you can clearly see it is rather amateurishly shot (which is also excused by the fact that this is Jackson's directorial debut), but the gore effects are pretty impressive considering the low production values, even if it was made nearly three decades ago. The amateurish acting (except for the alien leader), along with the cinematography and special effects were done in true 80's style, back when movies didn't rely on CGI but instead on "real" special effects, which adds to it's charm. If this was made 10 years ago, it would've been much less charming. The movie is pretty simple, which means you can just turn your brain off and enjoy the movie for what it is; A comedy splatterfest with no gimmicks, or hidden messages. The gore is so over-the-top that you can't help but find it hilarious every time brains gets splattered all over the place. The film doesn't try to take itself serious in any way, which just further adds to it's comedic values. The character of Derek is the funniest one in the film, and he has some pretty hilarious one-liners; "I'm a Derek and Derek's don't run", "The headshot's the only true stopper", "I'm born again" (the last remark should be taken into context with the climax).Overall, not a bad movie, even though it may at first glance look like one. It's understandable that this movie has gained a cult-following. I would definitely recommend it to fans of gore and horror, if they haven't already seen it.

Let's face it - When it comes to its hilarious, old school, grind-gore effects (that are really quite over-the-top and need to be seen to be believed), Bad Taste is a small-scale "Alien Invasion" picture that would have, otherwise, been forgotten long ago and dismissed as pure rubbish without them.With so much going against it (terrible dialogue, dumb situations, badly-staged violence, incompetent direction, predictable story), 1987's Bad Taste would be Peter Jackson's first feature film as a director and, with that, it, unfortunately, showed his amateur status clearly at this very early stage in his career.All-in-all - The appropriately titled "Bad Taste" was at least worth a few honest-to-goodness belly-laughs. The absolute highlight of its z-grade hilarity was the priceless moment when the aliens' asses were exposed to the viewer. Talk about funny! Set in the remote, New Zealand town of Kiahoro, Bad Taste was produced on a shoe-string budget of just 200,000 NZ dollars.Besides not giving a sweet-damn about the fate of any of the characters in the story, this viewer also thought that the film's rock & roll soundtrack stank, big-time.Oh, well - What the heck, eh? I still thought that its cheesy effects were a lot of fun to watch.