Bad Taste (1987)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2019) The mid-1980s were a golden age for movie-obsessed geeks picking up a camera and deciding to make a movie of their own with friends and family. Peter Jackson was one of those, and from the depths of New Zealand came a most unusual film in Bad Taste, an incredibly over-the-top gory horror comedy featuring four operatives taking on a murderous alien invasion in a small town. The production values are threadbare, the acting is terrible, the camerawork is frantic and the whole thing doesn’t make a lot of sense … but it’s still a striking movie. The buckets of gore and blood (and alien vomit) are easier to take when they’re wrapped up in a gloriously absurd comedy. This is, after all, a film in which a protagonist stuffs part of his brain back in after falling off a cliff. (And if that’s not disgusting enough, he later uses alien brain fragments to do the same.)  It’s not that funny, but it’s not that disgusting either. (I have a much harder time with gore effects in deadly serious horror.) Certainly not for the faint of heart, Bad Taste nonetheless earns some sustained viewing attention thanks to some in-your-face stylistic camera moves, showing Jackson’s aggressive moviemaking techniques even with a near-zero budget. If you can, try to watch the contemporary making-of documentary “Good Taste made Bad Taste” (it’s on YouTube), which features a very young Jackson talking about the four-year shooting schedule of the film, his impressive garage-made special effects and his overall enthusiasm for making movies. The documentary adds quite a bit to the film itself. Our knowledge that Jackson would pick up an armful of Oscars not even two decades later also adds tremendously to the film.