Dir. Peter Jackson
New Zealand
Film #5, for Friday 5th October, of Hallowen 31 for 31
Spare a thought for the poor
bastards who don’t work with large, well established groups who deal with extraterrestrial
activity like the Men in Black or those who work out of Area 51. The middle America,
full of UFO sightings, where either a police force who are not taught to deal
with such cases, or a small group of amateur or professional (but unfunded) specialists,
have to contact with alien life but get all their credit stolen by FBI agents
called Mulder and Sculley when they’ve done all the legwork. Even the most well
known version of these tales from Britain, H.G. Welles’s War of the Worlds, inextricably tied to London and the devastation
of the nerve centre of South England, has to exist in a British landscape, even
then, full of rural countryside populated by farmers and tourists on walking
holidays, villages with only one (about to close) post office and little else,
and seasides. Martian tripods could easily rise out of the waters of Blackpool
beach, or closer to home, Mablethrope seaside, crushing sweet shop stands that
sell lollipops in the shape of breasts and penises as well as candy floss and
ginger snaps, and disintegrating whole donkey rides and miniature golf players
with their heat rays. Who’s going to be there first, before the Army comes in,
to deal with the mess?
Spare a thought for Bad Taste’s The Astro Investigation and
Defence Service, a New Zealand group who even have to put up with a name so
politically incorrect even in 1987 when written as an acronym. Either they have
no time to discuss changing it, although one member at a brief point wishes
they could, or, dealing with malevolent aliens rampaging around their beautiful
but quaint countryside, the sick humour of the name is something to take their
minds off said nasties terrifying the sheep and making whole towns of people
disappear. Unfortunately, finding the entirety of the population of Kaihoro
missing, they have to deal with aliens who want to use human beings as the main
food supply for an intergalactic fast food franchise. Never has the terms ‘Heavy
Users’ and ‘Super Heavy Users’, from the Morgan Spurlock documentary Super Size Me (2004), been as macabre as
when you link them to the activities of the aliens in Bad Taste...
The innocuous nature of Peter
Jackson’s first three films – this, Meet
The Feebles (1989), and Brain Dead
[Dead Alive] (1992) – is a huge factor in why they are as memorable as they
are as well as other factors. Even horror-comedy can feel completely disconnected
from reality, not a gritty fake world depicted in most realistic dramas, but
one full of non-sequiturs, odd tangents and accidental slip-ups that happen in
real life. Everyone looks like a model or a plastic composition of what a
normal person is, the settings glamorous metropolises (New York, Los Angeles)
or cleaned up versions of places, and never would it be conceived that one of
the main heroes, with an uzi in hand to take out the mindless hordes, would
step in a patch of cow dung and slip like in this film. Bad Taste still has a final chapter that is an extended gun battle,
but because of its low budget, its setting, and its jokey and naive tone, such
images are pulled up into being inherently silly as well as gripping. That the
film is as much a comedy as well as horror, keeping in the boom of ‘splatterstick’
and horror-comedies made in the 1980s, enforces this as it never takes itself
seriously. Sight gags, jokes against places within New Zealand, and aliens
giving the heroes the middle finger during combat all pile up together in their
frivolousness to create something inanely charming. The first three films of
Jackson’s, even in the perversity of Meet
The Feebles, were able to take such juvenile humour and ideas, and makes
them into imaginative, amusingly inane but compelling areas. Brain Dead [Dead Alive] would succeed
the most as its 1950s setting and the era’s stereotypical stiltedness already
brought a sense of naivety and innocence to the characters and interactions
that were invaded by the bloodiest and graphically imaginative gore and zombie
attack scenes you could see. That they are New Zealand films, part of the
British Commonwealth, does have a lot to say; connections with the British and
our use of our own inanity within our most surreal and disgusting jokes is matched
by the utter amusement of how Jackson runs with the connections with the
British Royalty and our culture within his country, just by the amount of times
our current Queen or Prince Charles’ faces appear in such a gory film.
The gore is the most distinctive
aspects of Bad Taste, but the virtue
of it and Brain Dead is that they
are more just decapitations and blood effects continually repeated, but delve
into a Carnivalesque mentality where the rules of human anatomy are destroyed,
as well as any vindictiveness and cruelty in the violence, and creativity is
allowed to sculpt organs, bloods and the body into whatever shape the creators
thought would stand out and was possible with the materials they had. Brain Dead stands over some of the best
and most regarded horror films for me because it pushes the ghoulishness of
gore and anatomy into surrealistic levels – where any body part or organ could
move sentiently, or be put together or re-sculpted into any shape – but Bad Taste still shows the same
flourishes that would been seen in that film. Case in point would be the
predicament that main character Derek (Jackson in one of two roles) has when
his skull is broken and he is in constant danger of his brains falling out. The
anatomy of the grey matter is slightly suspect even for me and my lack of
medical knowledge, but the complete lack of rules is what makes the gorier
sequences stand out. And it is not just these scenes to as, despite the low budgeted
nature of the film, shades of the camera techniques Jackson would have in his
later career and the Lord of the Rings
trilogy can be seen in these origins, the elaborate movements at certain
moments striking considering how difficult or time consuming some might have
been to pull off. They are not up there with where Sam Raimi and his friends went
to with The Evil Dead (1981), but
the attempts to play with the form of cinema in one’s debut, made over four
years, can be seen and are the best virtues of the film. Jackson even has his
Derek character and another played by himself who is one of the aliens, fight
on top of a cliff, whether out of practicability or to see if he and the rest
of the film production team could pull it off, the mirrored doppelganger effect
a memorable and applaudable attempt even if it’s obvious how they set the
individual shots together to make it work.
My interactions with Jackson’s
more acclaimed, later period is cut short. I have not really caught up with
them from Heavenly Creatures (1994)
onwards, and when I revisited the first of the Lord of the Rings films last year, it was a tedious three hours
that put me off the rest of the trilogy. I even fear that Jackson may have lost
something that made him distinct in his early splatter period, a potential
reason I never caught up with the later films. And yet, aside from the fact
that I can still catch up with his work and could end up changing my mind, I
can still look at something like Bad
Taste with immense satisfaction. Sadly most genre films, regardless of
budget, and frankly most films, are lazy and passionless creations, or worse,
presume to be creative but end up being pretentious in their mindset. That is a
dangerous thing to suggest, especially as judging films is at the end of the
day a personal opinion distinct to each viewer, but laziness masquerading as
passion is a problem even if its disagreed upon. The sense that the digital
camera revolution, while allowing people with creativity to actually have
access to making a film, has caused most low budget genre cinema to sink into a
hack mentality further than before, as long as nudity and violence is on
screen, feels more apparent, even if it’s a distorted bias of mine that hasn’t
been fully shown the Video Rental Store of the Damned where films as far back
as the 1910s were capable of being half-hearted hackwork. It still cannot hide
though those films like Bad Taste which exist and radiate with a clear pride
of the filmmakers trying their hardest, something which even outside of
filmmaking is worth taking away from. As a person wanting to write and be a
writer, whether I can end up writing published novels or am content to post on
my blog like this, I want to push myself so the best and most creative work is
made. This is why this Halloween project, subconsciously, was started as well
as, when I considered it, improving my writing and creative skills outside of
hobbies for real world employment. Peter Jackson with Bad Taste clearly wanted to push himself with this film, and like
the most well regarded genre films, the large flaws cannot undermine this fact,
especially when he went on to make Meet
The Feebles and the masterpiece Brain
Dead, and successfully raised the bar and made better films. And this is not
a hollow mentality that you see in Bad
Taste either - the kind that film fans making their own work accidentally
channel or celebrate that does not capture a sense of life of what is outside
of the cinema - but something that is as much a creation made with life, which
factors into its innocuous charm, while still is a genre film for the diehard
film fanatics. This sort of filmmaking leads to great reward for the makers and
the viewers, and now 26 years old or so, Bad
Taste has probably made double the reward for itself.
The tone of the film is perfectly
set up before the film actually starts. There's an image of the New Zealand flag.
An image of a young Queen Elizabeth II
on a horse in regal clothes. It suits the ridiculous tone of the film and
explains so much about why Braindead
became as it is. It's not just because it's still one of the goriest films ever
made and so over-the-top in its content. It's because it still does this while
being so jovial. So quaint. British idiosyncrasies twisted around and rebuilt
through a new viewpoint of a former British colony. That throughout it, for all
the bizarre dismemberment, it feels so middle class in tone, which makes it
funnier. Set in fifties New Zealand, Lionel (Timothy Balme) is a likable young man who has the potential for
eternal happiness when the young Spanish woman who works at the nearby grocer's,
Paquita (Diana Peñalver), takes
immense interest in him romantically and pulls him out of his shell, the
predictions of her grandmother through tarot cards about literal eternal
happiness making her adamant about sparking the relationship. Unfortunately
Lionel's sole surviving relative in his close family, his mother (Elizabeth Moody), is domineering and controlling
of him, wishing him to be there for her beck and call, and certainly she's not
happy when his attention is directed to Paquita. This situation is made worse
when Mum is accidentally bitten by the newest exhibit at the zoo, the
horrifying (but, brilliantly, stop motion) Sumatran rat-monkey. Shown in the
pre-credits to be acquired by the zoo through gruesome cost, the rat-monkey's
bite causes a victim to decay will still alive, die and become a member of the
living dead with the ability to survive even being hacked to pieces. The
zombification of Mum forces Lionel to become a social outcast, breaking Paquita's
heart in the process and pushing her away, as he is stuck with his sleazy uncle
(Ian Watkin) swooping it to try and
acquire all the wealth his late sister had, and a basement of ever increasing
numbers of zombies. As zombie cinema has taught us, infections can spread quite
quickly and Lionel already has a few undead occupants, without rent needing to
be paid, in his house without potential ones being created through the party
his uncle wants to start. 
