Bad Taste

Peter Jackson is best known for the The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, but a long time ago he made his own cult film: Bad Taste. Watching it is a bit of cinema history, in the same way that watching The Evil Dead series is a prelude to Sam Raimi's later work. This whole movie reminds me of a role-playing game session from my high school days, where game masters and players made things up as they went along.

The first thing you notice is that Bad Taste is well, bad. The film and audio quality is terrible. The accents are a bit difficult to understand for Americans. One of the characters, Derek, appears to be mentally ill. And yet there's a certain rough charm to the whole thing.

The plot, such as it is, involves a crack team of government agents who work for the Astro-Investigation and Defense Service (AIDS) sent to investigate the disappearance of the citizens of Kaihoro, New Zealand. Your reaction to the in-joke name of the agency will dictate whether you find Bad Taste to be hilarious or stupid. An agency with an acronym like AIDS is something my high school buddies might dream up on a whim.

The AIDS strike force consists of Ozzy (Terry Potter), Barry (Peter O'Herne), Frank (Mike Minett), and the aforementioned Derek. They stumble onto an alien race of merchants who know all about "how to serve man," and not the butler kind of service. The film begins with the capture of one of the aliens, Robert (Peter Jackson), who is held captive by hanging him over the edge of a cliff by his ankle. While Barry explores the ghost town, Derek decides to torture the leader for information by stabbing him in the foot. This ultimately leads to the other aliens coming to the rescue, Robert escaping, and Derek falling off a cliff to his supposed death.

"Wait, Derek died?" asks Derek's player.

"Yeah," says the GM. "You had a good fight there with the alien sledgehammers but you slipped off the cliff."

"But," whines the player, "I was just getting started! You can't kill Derek off like that!"

"Okay, fine. Derek lands on seagull eggs and only some of his brain falls out, but he's still alive. Now he's crazy as a loon."

"Great! I stuff his brains back into his skull and keep going..."

In comes Giles player. "Hey guys. Is it too late to play?"

"Nah," says the GM. "You're a collector whose come to Kaihoro to collect. And the aliens abduct you and toss you in a stew!"

"Oh, great..."

Bad Taste pretty much devolves from there, leading to Derek attacking people with a chainsaw, Ozzy and Frank firing rocket-launchers at the aliens, and the aliens themselves turning out to be shoulder- and butt-padded monstrosities who can barely run much less pose a threat to anybody. It all ends with a house flying into space.

Bad Taste veers from thrilling action to long, boring pans of characters walking from Point A to Point B. There are random gags (most of them involving slipping on some form of excrement), over-the-top violence ranging from organs being stuffed into places to drinking someone else's vomit, and plenty of jokes about aliens and action movies. The action scenes are actually very well done, and there's plenty of people running as machine gun fire peppers their feet.

Bad Taste makes no bones about what it is - a cult film. Jackson's humor is evident here, but he would go on to do much more horrifying and humorous films. While Bad Taste is no Evil Dead, it's still enjoyable as a piece of film history over a couple of beers with your buddies.