Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 4: Bad Taste

Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 4: Bad Taste

Peter Jackson, writer/director of the Lord of the Rings films, started his gargantuan career with this wild, creative, and endlessly silly gore movie, which he made almost entirely on his own.

Only having done a few shorts before, at the age of 26 Jackson released Bad Taste, a sci-fi/horror/comedy film about a group of aliens who don human appearances in order to capture real humans and eat them in the form of an intergalactic snack called Crumb's Country Delight. The plot's not very important though, what's really fun about the movie is how creative Jackson's filmmaking is in the context of his extremely small budget.

There's all sorts of fun camerawork and plenty of both gross-out and just plain goofy gags, but the real star of the show is Jackson's special effects. All sorts of masks, prosthetics, gore, blood, ooze, explosions, and models were used in this film, and they're all passionately and expertly created by Jackson himself. It's this handmade quality that makes Bad Taste worth anything at all, because the actual story and dialogue are dumb to say the least.

The actors are all Jackson's friends, and they're also the crew of the movie, so there's lots of room for forgiving their not-so-great acting - but what I can't forgive is the musical score, which is so bad it sometimes actively works against what's happening on the screen. The script is also bad, but with a name like Bad Taste it's clear to tell what Jackson was going for, and that goal was certainly accomplished. There's plenty of gore humor, a clear precursor to the far more brilliant Dead Alive (or Braindead), which I saw last year and still highly recommend.

If you have interest in becoming a filmmaker or you just love sci-fi, gore, and practical effects, this is a fun little gem to check out. If you only like movies where there's a great story and interesting, three-dimensional characters, this is absolutely not for you.