Bad, Bad, Bad…but the title is actually Bad Taste

The most enticing thing about Peter Jackson’s first film when it came out in the 80s was that there was a picture of a goofy alien flipping the bird on the cover of the VHS box. I don’t even know if it’s fair to judge this as a real movie. It comes across as a film school project. While watching it, I was thinking Jackson must have gotten a bunch of his friends together to make a film. I found out that was exactly the case when I looked in the trivia section on imdb.

I’ve seen this film cheered as awesome, gory, funny, etc. I would say it has moments that show promise of a director who may someday go on to direct a really cool remake of King Kong, but I also find it hard to believe it actually got distribution when he was a nobody. I like bad movies. I like LOTS of bad movies. Movies everyone else hates. I fricking love From Justin To Kelly!!! I just can’t love Bad Taste.

This is like watching a bunch of kids play really bad army games for an hour and a half. And don’t expect horror. There’s gore galore, but this isn’t a movie meant to be scary, suspenseful, or atmospheric. It’s sort of like a precursor to Jackson’s far superior, equally repulsive Dead Alive.

Nearly the first half hour of the film is some dude fighting off what are essentially a bunch of The Crazies. Constantly going for the gross out or slapstick humor wears thin really fast. The whole film is like this, with just a small band of men fighting what eventually turn out to be a bunch of the “Bad Taste” aliens on the front cover of the video. There are endless “action” scenes of hand-to-hand combat or gun fighting. This is the kind of stuff where someone takes a swing, there’s a cut, then we see the other person reacting to the hit. It’s tedious.

It’s all about the gross outs: brains eaten from some guy’s head with a spoon; a vomit drinking scene; seagull poop to the face; a guy with a big hole in his head who needs to keep shoving his brains back in.

Good moments include a cute guy with Corey Hart hair and another guy wearing a Tales from the Crypt shirt. And if you’re into gnarly Bad Taste alien butt, about an hour into the film, the aliens, who are disguised as humans, turn into Bad Tastes, and their nasty butts (which look much like their faces) rip through their jeans like chaps.

I simply do not have that non-thinking fanboy “X can do no wrong, I will defend everything X does” mentality about anything: music, movies, actors, directors, writers, video game systems, politics. If someone spits shit at me, I’m the first to say it left a really bad taste in my mouth rather than spitting that shit back out as if it’s the word of God. I’m hopelessly devoted to no one. Although, I’ve never heard an Olivia Newton-John song I didn’t love.