Good Taste Made Bad Taste

Short Film (Excerpts) – 1988

This documentary showcases some of the tricks of the trade used by Peter Jackson in the making of his first feature — the aliens-amok-in-Makara splatter classic, Bad Taste. Compiled following the film's 1988 Cannes market screening, it's framed around an extensive interview with a 25-year-old Jackson at his parents’ Pukerua Bay home. These excerpts offer fascinating insight into his ingenuity: from building a DIY Steadicam, to the making of the infamous sheep-obliterating rocket launcher scene, to PJ musing on the impetus that being an only child provided him.

The idea with most special effects, I reckon, is to keep them as simple as possible. If you’ve got to have a machete going into somebody’s head, it’s easier to have a real person’s head with a fake machete, so you knock something together like this with a bit of cardboard and some ice cream sticks …
– Jackson on DIY special effects