Bad Taste (1987)

Bad Taste is the kind of midnight-movie miracle that reminds you why people fall in love with filmmaking in the first place: it’s Peter Jackson, years before The Lord of the Rings, building an entire splatter-sci-fi world with sheer nerve, rubbery ingenuity, and a wicked sense of humor. The tone is gleefully unhinged—part alien-invasion B-movie, part gross-out comedy, part action free-for-all—where every new set piece feels like a dare the movie can’t resist taking. What makes it special isn’t polish so much as personality: the homemade makeup effects are proudly tactile, the jokes are shameless, and the pacing keeps upping the ante with the confidence of a filmmaker discovering what he can get away with. It’s absolutely not for the squeamish (the gore is frequent and enthusiastic), but if you can meet it on its own scrappy, splattery wavelength, it’s a riotous showcase of imagination that earns its cult status.

Bad Taste is Peter Jackson’s scrappy, no-budget love letter to splatter horror, aiming for maximum shock, DIY ingenuity, and gross-out laughs with an alien-invasion premise that’s proudly ridiculous. The problem is it’s less a “movie night” crowd-pleaser and more a gore-effects demo reel: pacing is rough, performances are amateur, and the humor is crude enough that if you don’t enjoy cartoonishly nasty excess, you’ll be checking the clock fast. The violence is relentlessly graphic and often played for laughs, so anyone squeamish or looking for real sci-fi tension should steer clear. If you can tolerate the mess, there’s genuine charm in the homemade effects and sheer commitment, but this is absolutely niche entertainment for splatter devotees only.