For those familiar with their horror, Peter Jackson as a filmmaking tour de force didn’t begin with Lord of the Rings trilogy, or even The Frighteners, the film that helped make his name in North America. It began with a small section in your local video store (if you were lucky), where the hardcore gore cognoscenti would flock to rent some of the most excessively repulsive films this side of Fulci.
Very few contemporary filmmakers have proffered up such over-the-top splatter as The Lord of The Rings, King Kong and The Hobbit director. Aliens eating vomit (Bad Taste), zombified pus dripping into custard (Braindead) and regurgitated pseudo-muppets (Meet the Feebles) are just the start in a series of burn-in-your-brain-nauseating images Jackson has ushered into the horror genre.
But to mark Jackson’s splatter period as merely a youthful experimental phase is to deny what makes him so extraordinary. Like many of our most successful contemporary directors, Jackson’s early work says much about his ingenuity – and blind drive – as a filmmaker today. It speaks volumes that that the first film Jackson ever made was ‘King Kong’. He was 12, using a super-8 camera, and his star was built out of wire and rubber.
In celebration of the advent of Jackson’s latest blockbuster, and in the spirit of the month where we embrace all that is putrid, here’s a look at the splatter films of Peter Jackson.
For the enjoyment of those with good taste, and bad.
Warning: This article contains screenshots and video clips featuring gore. Oh, and mild spoilers.
Bad Taste began its life as a short film, created by Jackson and a group of his friends in his hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, during the mid-‘80s. But as Jackson’s ambitions grew, so did the project, eventually mutating – and that’s the word for it – into a 90-minute feature, shot over four years. The film was made on Jackson’s own dime, so shooting was done on weekends, and many of his friends worked for free.
In an early example of Jackson’s remarkable ingenuity, Bad Taste was written, directed, edited, photographed and produced by Jackson, who also applied the make-up, designed and executed all the special effects – the fake blood was mixed in his kitchen sink – and starred in the lead role. The resulting film is low-budget-splatter filmmaking at its best; despite the meagre capital that went into it, it still manages to make you sick to your stomach.
Bad Taste tells the story of Derek (Jackson) and his friends Frank, Ozzy and Barry, sent by a secret government organisation to investigate the disappearance of all the citizens of a small rural town. What they find there is a group of space aliens, infiltrating the human race in order to harvest them for fast food.
For new audiences, it’s standard B-movie sci-fi – until the brains eating starts, followed by the sheep exploding, the bodies torn in half, and the aforementioned chunder chow scene, which revels so much in its own grossness (‘yum yum,’ the aliens say), that the gut-reaction is to laugh, rather than cringe.
And that’s just what makes Bad Taste so good: it’s damn funny. Of course, this was the intention; when Jackson’s Derek tried to shove bits of his brains back into his head while fighting against his body’s inevitable collapse you can see the director is having a riot of a time. It was through his experience making Bad Taste that Jackson realised he didn’t need to go to film school in order to become a filmmaker; he could just make it up as he went along.
Not much has changed.
Splat-o-meter – 3 out of 5 barf buckets – Gets 2 points for eating-brains-with-a-spoon alone.
Although Jackson doesn’t like the word ‘satire’ when describing his ’89 effort Meet the Feebles, there’s no denying the similarities between it and Jim Henson’s rather more palatable puppet-centric creation. The only difference, of course, is that Jackson’s all-singing, all-dancing, all-puppet feature is decidedly R-rated; if you’ve ever wanted to see what Fozzie Bear looks like on the inside, here’s your chance.
This is Jackson, once again, working with a tiny budget. The set, which served as the stage and backstage for ‘The Feebles Variety Hour’, was built in a derelict railway yard out of cardboard, scrap metal and plastic, while the puppets themselves were made out of plastic foam and glue. Money ran out during production, and the film was eventually patch-worked together by funding from the New Zealand Film Commission.
Yet Feebles manages to maintain that same caustic humor that debuted in Bad Taste, albeit on a more extreme scale. Cheekily marketed as ‘a film with no taste at all’, Meet the Feebles’ performing puppets outdo each other in the grotesque. There’s Harry the rabbit who fears he might have caught something after getting a little frisky with the chorus girls. There’s Wynyard (a frog), whose drug addiction is a means of coping with his ‘Nam flashbacks. There’s the star of the show, Heidi the hippo, whose love for her boyfriend, Blech (a walrus), is matched only by her voracious appetite.
If it all sounds a little Monty Python to you, you’d be right – but Feebles is more Mr. Creosote than the Ministry of Funny Walks. This is properly revolting stuff, leaving you in stunned raptures; my god, a puppet can do that? There’s a reporter who eats literal crap. There’s riotous gorging. There’s illegal pornography. There’s drugs, death and showtunes.
And during all the carnage, another Jackson trademark emerges – a real fondness for his characters, no matter how foul their behaviour. Meet the Feebles’ ending even has an inkling of real emotional resonance, despite being (typically) drenched in entrails. A film made with no taste at all, yes, but bittersweet nonetheless.
Splat-o-meter – 4 our of 5 barf buckets – You’d be surprised how much liquid muppets have inside them.
And here we are – the piece de resistance of Jackson’s splatter days, before he was to move on and do something sensible like make the critically lauded Heavenly Creatures in 1994. Braindead, (marketed in North America as Dead Alive), is widely regarded as one of the goriest films of all time. Funded once again by the New Zealand Film Commission, Jackson’s larger budget was put to excellent use on creature effects, realistic viscera and extraneous limbs. The screenplay he was working off – co-written with Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair – was subversive and fresh. Everything Jackson had learned from his previous films was poured into this balls-out, blood-soaked magnum opus.
But Braindead is, in essence, a romantic comedy, the story of a young Kiwi bloke named Lionel and his love for the local shopkeeper's daughter, Paquita. Will she reciprocate his affections? Who knows, and who really cares, because it just so happens that Lionel’s overbearing mother gets bitten by a Sumatran Rat-Monkey during a trip to the zoo and turns into a pus-bloated zombie. As the zombie plague spreads, Lionel attempts to keep all the infected contained within the house, rather than out, in order to save face from the prying eyes of neighbours and, of course, Pacquita.
It’s a set up ripe for comedy, and Jackson delivers it gleefully. From the formal opening images of the Queen and the New Zealand flag to the moment where Lionel literally re-enters his mother’s womb in one of the more horrific cinematic riffs on the Oedipus complex, nothing is sacred. There’s the bastard love-child of a zombie priest and a zombie nurse. There’s slapstick zombie sex. There’s the bit where Mum’s ear falls off into a bowl of custard and she eats it.
And then there’s that finale, a plot contrivance if there ever was one, but who cares – where a party is thrown in Lionel’s house and Lionel’s zombies, naturally, escape. The mayhem that ensues will leave even the most hardened splatter hounds queasy, and those with softer temperaments may very well part with their lunch. It’s all thanks to the following equation: take 100 parts zombie, add one part lawnmower. Beautiful in its simplicity.
Braindead works for many reasons, all of which hang off Jackson’s sense of the absurd – if you’d ever wandered where the ‘zom-com’ came from, here you go. It’s creative, it’s obscene, it’s utterly gratuitous, and it’s as ambitious as splatter gets. For Peter Jackson, it was an announcement to the world: this is just the beginning.
Splat-o-meter – 5 our of 5 barf buckets – For pure satisfaction, you need pure liquefaction.
Lucy O'Brien is Assistant Editor at IGN AU. You should talk to her about games, horror movies and the TV show Freaks & Geeks on IGN at Luce_IGN_AU,or follow her @Luceobrien on Twitter. If you like what you're readin', meet the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment