Editorials
[Butcher Block] Peter Jackson’s Splatstick Debut ‘Bad Taste’
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
When most people hear the name Peter Jackson, they think of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit series, King Kong, and blockbuster spectacles. For horror fans, he’s the director that delivered the fun horror comedy The Frighteners. And before that? A career debut with a trio of horror’s goriest splatter comedies, starting with Bad Taste.
The irony is that Jackson didn’t really have any interest in directing when he began. That interest came later. He was much more interested in special effects, and heavily influenced by the work of Tom Savini. So, he set out to make a 10-15 minute short film with an old 16mm camera. He shot on the weekends over the course of a year, just sticking tins of film under his bed as he went without much thought. After taking a week off of work to edit the footage, he realized he had a 60-minute movie on his hands without an ending. Which meant there was no other direction to go but to add on to the runtime and give it a proper ending.
Jackson also noticed that his rough first cut wasn’t very exciting. Since special effects is what got him interested in filmmaking in the first place, it was an easy fix- throw in all the gore he could manage. In addition to writing, directing, producing, handling cinematography, and appearing on screen in numerous roles, Jackson handled the film’s special effects and makeup effects. The most effective aspect of the movie, no matter how over-the-top the gore gags get.
The plot is pretty simple. The residents in the town of Kaihoro have gone missing, and Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) sends out four agents to investigate. They find the residents have been replaced by man-eating aliens disguised as humans in blue button-down shirts. Of the four agents, Jackson plays Derek, the most tenacious and persistent of the heroes. Derek is the comedic relief, and as such takes an insane amount of injury and abuse until he’s had enough of the alien menace.
Heads are blown to smithereens. Aliens puke neon green goo to be passed around and slurped up. And then there’s Derek. He falls off cliffs headfirst onto rocks. He survives and puts his brain back in his head, to be secured in place with a belt. It becomes a running gag for Derek to have to stuff those brains back in his skull in the midst of alien battle. Look for Derek to be “born again” via chainsaw in the film’s final moments; a precursor to Lionel’s bloody lawnmower triumph in Dead Alive/Braindead to be sure.
Four years later, and with the financial help of the New Zealand Film Commission, Bad Taste was completed and sold to many countries after playing at the Cannes Film Festival. A lighthearted comedy compared to Jackson’s immediate follow-up, Meet the Feebles. As it stands, Bad Taste is a goofy DIY splatstick film that has no aim beyond pure entertainment. There’s no hidden message or agenda, just an aspiring special effects artist teaching himself how to make a film. His love of gore and special effects foremost on display.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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