Trivia for
Bad Taste (1987) More at IMDbPro »

• Director Peter Jackson shot the film on weekends over a four-year period with friends playing the lead roles. Jackson funded most of the film himself until towards the end of the shoot when the New Zealand Film Commission gave him money to finish his project after being impressed with what he'd already produced. There was never a script for the movie; each scene was filmed from ideas the director had come up with during the week.
  
  
• One of the actors hadn't shaved. For continuity, he couldn't shave until the movie was completely shot.
  
  
• All the dialogue in the film was dubbed in post-production. This was for two reasons: A) Part of the footage had no sound with it, since it had been filmed on Peter Jackson's own 16mm camera which didn't support sound recording, and B) Once the New Zealand Film Commission funded the remainder of the film, Jackson hired a sound camera. However, neither Jackson nor his crew were very skilled with sound recording and most of the dialogue was unusable.
  
  
• Peter Jackson constructed his own counterweighted steady-cam device for this film that cost only $15.
  
  
• The movie was banned in the Australian state of Queensland until the early '90s, when the Queensland Censorship Board was disbanded.
  
  
• There are no female characters. Women played alien roles, but aliens appear to be all males.
  
  
• While the original VHS box artwork had the alien flipping the middle finger, tapes distributed to US video rental stores were provided with an extra finger that could be glued in place to make it look like it was making a "peace" sign instead.
  
  
• The film started life as a ten-minute short called "Roast of the Day", which started shooting in 1981. The story concerned Giles (Craig Smith), an aid worker who comes to the small coastal town of Kaihoro on collection day. The young man encounters a psychopath named Robert who then pursues him. Giles escapes the madman and reaches an old heritage estate where he tries to contact the authorities. However, the same clan of cannibalistic psychos that Robert is from occupies the house and captures Giles. In an ironic twist the aid worker is later cooked up to relieve the famine of the cannibals. Along the way Peter Jackson added the "special forces" team that would be sent to rescue Giles, but in this early version the "boys" would turn out to be cannibals as well (they staged the whole thing because they like to play with their food). When it came time for Jackson to finally edit the film together he found that he had nearly 50 minutes' worth of usable footage. So with its length and being inspired by the 16mm efforts of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981), Jackson continued shooting to make the movie a full-length feature.
  
  
• The movie technically takes place on Peter Jackson's birthday. You can find it out by checking the envelope that the collector is carrying with him in the movie.
  
  
• The big red chainsaw didn't actually work. All close-up shots of the chainsaw actually cutting through things were shot using a much smaller, but functional, chainsaw.
  
  
• Peter Jackson made all masks in his mother's kitchen. The heads of the aliens are bent backwards because otherwise they wouldn't fit in the oven where the latex was hardened.
  
  
• Craig Smith was part of the original cast and was married and then divorced within the four-year time frame it took to make the film. Because most of the filming took place on weekends, he found himself written out because his new wife - a devout Christian - objected to him working on Sundays. Smith was written back into the film when he got divorced.
  
  
• The "firearms" in the film are all non-functional replicas made by Peter Jackson. For example, what appears to be a WWII Sterling submachine gun is actually a length of aluminum pipe, a handle made from Fimo, and a piece of wood to stand in for the ammunition magazine. The actors shook the props to simulate recoil, and the muzzle flashes were added in post-production.
  
  
• During a scene where Derek's van swerves off the road and runs over one of the aliens, Ken Hammon sat on the hood of a van because they weren't able to buy a camera mount for the hood. Peter Jackson was driving, but neither noticed a tree stump hidden in the tall grass. The van stopped immediately from high speed, launching Ken and the camera into the air. Amazingly, both Hammon and the camera came out fine, but said, "We ain't doin' that one again!"
  
  
• Doug Wren who played the Alien leader, Lord Crumb, died during post-production. Because of the non-audio filming, his voice was dubbed by a different actor.
  
  
• The name of the town 'Kaihoro' under attack is a Maori word that can be translated as either "Food Town" or "Fast Food" - Kai meaning Food, and Horo meaning Village and also Quickly, depending on the context.
  
  

Related Links