Bad Taste (1987)

Bad Taste arrives from 1987, a full four years in the making, shot on weekends with a 16mm Bolex and finished with the assistance of a quarter of a million dollars from the New Zealand Film Commission. Peter Jackson directed, produced, wrote, edited, and played two roles, one of which fights the other in a cliffside sequence assembled from footage captured months apart. The alien masks were baked in his mother's oven. This is the cinema of pure enthusiasm, unburdened by any program beyond the desire to watch a man's brain fall out of his head.

The plot concerns an intergalactic fast food chain harvesting the residents of a fictional village for its franchise, and a four-man paramilitary outfit called the Astro Investigation and Defence Service, an acronym the film deploys without a flicker of self-consciousness. The gore is relentless. The humor is crude. A charity collector is nearly cooked with vegetables, and a character replaces the missing portion of his brain with an alien's brain, which costs him his sanity. The enterprise exists to deliver severed limbs and improvised rocket launchers, and it does so with a craftsman's patience.

In the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, the film is a blank page. Its cast is uniformly white and male, its women essentially absent, its politics nowhere in evidence. The Māori-derived place name is a pun about fast food, not a statement. The alien corporation is a joke about burgers, not a critique of capital. No climate sermon, no body-positive text, no framework of identity anywhere in the frame. The remainder is a splatter comedy of uncommon dedication and zero ideological ambition. We grade it accordingly, and we do so without disappointment. It belongs to a period before the questions were being asked, and it has no interest in answering them.