Bad Taste

• Jackson shot it on weekends across roughly four years, starting it as a short called 'Roast of the Day' — the simple tale of a charity collector who wanders into town and gets cooked by aliens — before it ballooned into a feature as the crew kept inventing new material. The cast was his own friends, several of them playing multiple roles.
• The whole thing ran through a 25-year-old secondhand 16mm Bolex that couldn't even record sound, so every line of dialogue was dubbed in later. Jackson built his own spring-loaded Steadicam-style rig for about $20, following plans he found in Cinemagic magazine, and fashioned the alien guns out of aluminium tubing and wood.
• The foam-rubber alien masks were baked hard in his mother's home oven in Pukerua Bay, which meant the family kept getting bumped to sausages for dinner while the kitchen was tied up curing latex.
• For the notorious sick-bowl scene, Jackson made a cast of his own face to build a puppet of himself and filled the vomit with yogurt, muesli, and green food dye, then had the gang slurp it back up. He played both the human hero Derek and the alien Robert, with the two characters fighting each other on a cliffside via careful editing of shots taken separately.
• The New Zealand Film Commission stepped in near the end with around NZ$235,000 to actually finish a movie that started at roughly NZ$25,000 of pocket change — bankrolling the back third of what had begun as a no-budget amateur project.
• Queensland, Australia pulled it from theaters just three weeks into its run despite an already-trimmed, board-approved cut — a move so heavy-handed it helped get the Queensland Film Board of Review disbanded. Germany held off on any theatrical release until 2000, and its FSK 18 home version was hacked down by about seven minutes. The film sold to country after country off the back of its Cannes market screening and became a cult artifact almost immediately.

The whole film is a splatter parody of consumer capitalism eating itself: the invaders aren't conquerors, they're a franchise expansion team, and humanity is just untapped supply chain. Crumb's Crunchy Delights treats Earth exactly the way a real burger empire treats a new market, which makes the gore a punchline about being processed, packaged, and sold rather than a threat of conquest.

Derek's leaking brain works as a meta-joke about the production itself. As his skull comes apart and he straps it back together with a belt and hats, the movie holds itself together the same way, with homemade rigs, borrowed money, and sheer stubbornness, until both man and film cross over into something fully unhinged by the end.

The squad's escalating willingness to gut and dismember the aliens blurs who the real monster is. By the finale, the line that says 'I'm born again' lands on a human who has become as much of a meat-grinding predator as the things he was sent to stop, suggesting the appetite for violence was always native to Earth, not imported.

Aliens have landed in the sleepy New Zealand burg of Kaihoro, and they're not here to study us. They're a scouting crew for Crumb's Crunchy Delights, an intergalactic fast-food chain that's decided human meat is the next big flavor. Standing between the species and the deep fryer: a four-man government wet-work squad, including the unraveling Derek, who takes a header off a cliff and spends the back half holding his own leaking brain in place with a hat and a belt. What follows is chainsaws, exploding heads, and a finale that turns one man into a weapon.