MAKING OF BAD TASTE BY KEN HAMMON
THIS HAS BUGGERED YOUR PLANS FOR CONQUERING THE UNIVERSE
I met Pete Jackson at Kapiti College in 1978 when we were both 16 and assigned the same class (in New Zealand a college is the equivalent of a high school in America). Both being film buffs we got on well and started hanging out together. Pete had been making amateur movies for years using a super 8mm camera his parents had bought for him. His films were fairly awful, actually, but he used to write, direct, shot, edit and stage the special effects and he learned a great deal from them. ln 1978 a popular New Zealand kid's T.V. programme called SPOT ON announced it's first ever amateur film making competition. Pete, me and some other kids (including Pete O'Herne, who grew up in the same town as Pete and appeared in several of his early shorts) went out and made a short film called THE VALLEY over a bunch of weekends. The other entries in the competition ran, like, three minutes tops but THE VALLEY ran twenty minutes and featured way more violence than the judges either wanted or expected. The film was heavily influenced by Pete's love of Ray Harryhausen movies and featured two stop motion special effects sequences, which Pete staged himself; building the models and performing the stop motion. The stand out sequence involved a fight to the death between me and a hulking Cyclops creature based (or stolen, if you prefer) on the one from THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD). Anyway, we didn't win the competition (which pisses me off to this day) but we did gain some notoriety in school when they screened clips of the film on T.V.
At the end of 1978 Pete and I left school and got full time jobs. I ended up at the Housing Corporation of NZ, where I met Craig Smith, and Pete started at Wellington Newspapers Ltd in the production department where he met just about everyone else who appears in BT. On the weekends we shot another super 8mm short, this one based on Pete's love of James Bond. Called COLDFINGER it basically consisted of two fights to the death between Bond (Pete doing terrible Sean Connery impression) and ma and Pete O'Herne as the ill-fated bad guys.
After doing so many short films Pete had the idea in 1981 of making a feature on super 8mm. Called THE CURSE OF THE GRAVEWALKER it was a vampire story inspired by Pete's love of Hammer horror movies. We shot for twelve months with Pete playing Captain Eumig (named after my super 8mm projector), a fearless vampire killer, O'Herne playing the evil vampire leader Murnau (named after the director of NOSPERATU) and me playing a motley assortment of vampires in different costumes and make-up. Pete made all the fake swords, crossbows and armour, made all the costumes and designed and applied the make-up. We then went out and charged around Wellington graveyards filming big fight scenes to the bemusement of the general populace. After a year of this sanity returned and we realized that shooting a feature on super 8mm bordered on lunacy. We abandoned GRAVEWALKERS and resolved not to film anymore until Pete had saved up enough to buy a 16mm camera and we could shoot something that would have the actual possibility of being seen somewhere.
In 1983 Pete bought a second hand spring wound 16mm Bolex camera arid we set out to make a ten-minute short film called ROAST OF THE DAY. The plot was simple; Giles, a collector for famine relief, goes to Kaihoro, an isolated coastal town, for collection day. He finds the town eerily lifeless, even by New Zealand standards. On the way back to his car he is attacked and pursued by Robert, a maniac with a bayonet. He gets to his car and drives like the clappers through the countryside until he gets to a large house (Gear House, a stately house in Porirua, north of Wellington), he stops to call the authorities but the house is occupied by cannibals related to the nutjob on the beach. They knock him on the head, cook him up and relieve their famine. The End.
On 27 October 1983
we had our first day of filming in Nakara Beach, a small seaside town that,
along with Pete's hometown of Pukerua Bay, was used to portray Kaihoro. The
disaster prone Craig Smith - employed at the time as a clerk for the Housing
Corporation - played Giles. Pete - still at Wellington Newspapers Ltd - played
Robert and I - after spending most of 1983 on the dole - was working as a store
man in a Pharmaceutical warehouse. The first days filming was uneventful except
for one incident. One of the first shots we did was of a signpost Pete built
pointing the way to Kaihoro (the other sign on the post points to Castle Rock,
which is a Stephen
King reference). We stuck up the sign, shot the footage then took the sign down
again and drove away. About an hour later a cop drove up and said we had been
seen vandalizing road signs! Luckily we were able to convince him it was our
own sign and the whole thing blew over.
After the first day we fell into a style of filming that would stretch out way, way, longer than any of us could ever have imagined. When Pete had scraped together enough money to buy a roll of film we would convene on a Sunday at a location and shoot until the sun went down or we ran out of film. Since the film was never scripted there was a tendency to add details and for simple sequences to end up much more elaborate than planned. The first major addition grew out of Pete's fascination with the S.A.S. (Special Air Services), New Zealand's black clad, black hooded, armed anti-terrorist squad. Pete decided there would be a sequence where three S.A.S. men break into Gear House and ostensibly rescue Giles from the cannibals. We had a hard time figuring this into the plot but finally decided the S.A.S. men would be fake and actually turn out to be part of the cannibal family and they staged the whole rescue scene because they like to play with their food! Roped into playing the S.A.S. were Pete O'Herne - then an office worker for the Ministry of Transport - Terry Potter and Mike Minett - two colleagues of Pete's from the NNL production department. Through the winter of '84 we shot the increasingly complicated S.A.S. rescue action scenes.
About a year after filming commenced Pete hired an editing bench from the National Film Unit and cut together the footage we had shot; it came to a whopping fifty minutes! Somehow our ten-minute short had grown like a cancer. In July 1984 THE EVIL DEAD had screened at the Wellington Film Festival and its success had convinced Pete you could make money with a 16mm semi-amateur horror movie. We resolved to keep shooting and make a full-length feature, adding a ton of gore along the way (the film at this point had no splatter effects at all). Somewhere in here I came up with the title BAD TASTE, a title Pete never liked but it was the best anyone could come up with (Pete preferred the title GILLS' BIG DAY but we all hated it). To add to the length of the film and to get more special effects in there, Pete decided the cannibals would turn out to be aliens.
We worked out that the S.A.S. who saved Giles would unmask, showing human faces, then transform into their alien shapes. They would drag Giles back to Gear House to be killed and cooked but he would go apeshit, kill a bunch of aliens with a chainsaw and escape. There was then supposed to be an elaborate special effects scene of Giles in an alien-flying car fighting to the death with a stop motion monster called the Botha Beast of Trom. After somehow defeating the monster Giles would stumble across the alien space ship. Getting a bazooka from the alien's weapon stockpile he would blow it up as it took off.
We shot a lot of this storyline through '85, including the scene where O'Herne's face morphs into an alien make-up quite different from the one used in the completed film. Then disaster struck, Craig Smith had gotten married, had a nervous breakdown and become a born again Christian and declared he could no longer appear in such a violent and sleazy movie. Around this time Terry Potter had also gotten married and was planning to move to Australia and asked to be written out as well.
With some difficulty we came up with a new storyline explaining all this; the S.A.S. men would not be aliens, they would be humans working for the Alien Investigation and Defense Service of the NZ government sent to Kaihoro to investigate reports of an alien invasion. O'herne was called Barry, Terry was Ozzy (named after his idol Ozzy Oshourne), Mike played Frank and Pete was added to the mix as the AIDS leader Derek. We finished up Craig and Terry by shooting a scene where Giles and Ozzy are found dead then spent the rest of '85 through '86 shooting footage introducing "the boys.
We shot the early scenes of Barry in Kaihoro (a word that in English means 'eat greedily") where I play Wbitey, the first alien to die, wearing a bad blond wig and the scenes where Barry is chased through Kaihoro by a group of aliens (it was a joke in the film that O'Herne, the least athletic of the cast, was the one who was made to run the most). Some of these scenes were shot at O'Herne's mum's house with her garden shed and garage putting in appearances. We also shot the scenes of Derek on top of the cliff; a sequence I remember as the most grueling of the shoot. We spent months every Sunday schlepping heavy equipment up to the top of this goddamn hill
in Pukerua Bay, shooting all day over a precipitous drop (which never looked as dangerous on film as it did in real life) and then schlepping everything back down again. This sequence involved the famous scene with Pete where he, playing both Derek and Robert, has a fight with himself. We shot this with Pete first playing Robert and me doubling as Derek, then Pete had a shave and a haircut and played Derek and I put on a wig and played Robert. Somehow it all cut together and Robert was able to push Derek off the cliff to his death. However, Pete liked Derek so much that he later decided that he wasn't, in fact, dead and he brought him back later to complete the film.
In 1985 Pete had sent a copy of the initial fifty-minute cut of BT to the New Zealand Film Commission to apply for funding. The Commission, and it's CEO Jim Booth, were amazed by the footage but declined funding, suggesting we keep filming and apply again later. We applied again in 1986 and this time the Commission couldn't deny the quality of what we were doing. But the NZFC is a government agency and runs scared of public controversy. Jim Booth, who liked the movie, felt the Commission could put a little money into the film and then play down their involvement. For the film to get a large grant it would have had to go through the NZFC Committee for approval. Jim didn't think the Committee would approve a film so lacking in redeeming qualities so he avoided the process altogether and paid us small sums of money out of the NZFC Script Development Fund over which he had approval. Jim and Pete became friends through all this and Jim later quit the Commission to become a producer and worked with Pete on MEET THE FEEBLES, BRAINDEAD and HEAVENLY CREATURES. With the money from the Commission Pete was able to quit his job at WNL and work full time on BT. He designed and built the most elaborate SFX of the film, including the alien make-up, Derek's do it yourself brain surgery and the Gear House conversion into a space ship.
Terry came back from Australia and Craig's religious fever wore off and they both ended up back in the film. Finally, the last days filming took place; the phenomenally gory scene where Derek is born again, and Bad Taste's never ending shoot actually - Free at last, Lord, Free at last - came to an end.
One of the miracles of El is that no-one was badly hurt during it's production. I was talking once to a stunt co-ordinater while doing extra work on BRAINDEAD and he said "some of that stuff looked dangerous, what kind of safety equipment did you use?" And I went "Safety equipment!? SAFETY EQUIPMENT!!? Why didn't we think of that!?!"
Probably the nearest to a bad accident involved Mike Minett who was damn near hit in the face by a flying 10 kilogram sledge hammer during a fight scene. Pete's worse moment had him as Robert dangling upside-down over a cliff. If the rope had given way he would have kissed his arse goodbye (Pete later spent hours hanging from the ceiling for the scene where Derek slaughters Lord Crumb, thereby setting some sort of world record for a director hanging upside- down). Craig's most celebrated close call came when one of the explosive charges we used to simulate bullet strikes (Pete made them at home) went off with way too much vigor nearly hitting him in the slats! Craig complained about that one for years afterwards. My own worst near disaster came when we were shooting the scene where Derek's van swerves off the road and runs over one of the aliens (played by Costa Dotes, a film-maker friend of Pete's who went on to collaborate with him on a number of projects; FORGOTTEN SILVER most notably, and who is now filming a behind the scenes documentary on THE LORD OF THE RINGS). Since we couldn't afford a camera bracket I simply sat on the hood of the van with the camera as Pete drove it at great velocity towards Costa. Unfortunately we didn't realize there was a sodding big tree stump hidden in the long grass we had to drive through. The van hit the tree stump and came to a dead halt, I, on the other hand, went flying like a fucking lawn dart straight off the van and arse other elbow through the air and right towards Costa, who had to dive the hell out of the way! Somehow I, and more importantly the camera, survived. This became a rare example of a shot where it was decided "we ain't doin' that one again!"
My most memorable stunt performance came in the scene where during the raid on Gear House Frank strafes a tree with machine gun fire and a whole bunch of aliens fall out. Since Terry and I were the only ones insane enough to fall out of the tree we played all the aliens between us. Terry and I jumped out of the tree, two other blokes took our places on the ground, we put on different hats, jumped out again and then got and did it one more time. Terry and I had a competition to see who could do the best fall, which I think I won with a darned impressive face first dive smack into the dirt.
The worst actual accident I can remember involved me, naturally. We were filming a shot of Derek's van driving along by the beach in Pukerua Bay. I was standing up filming through the sunroof of the late Phil Lamey's car and we hit a bleeding great pothole and I was thrown like a rag doll from one side of the sunroof to the other damn near breaking my ribs. I spent the next few weeks hobbling with ribs that were black and blue.
The most frequently asked question when it comes to BT is "did you really blow up a sheep?" Craig always answers, "hey, it was an old sheep." Actually it was a carpenter's workhorse covered with some old sheepskin rugs but it was originally planned for the sheep to have a much larger part in the movie. Unfortunately, this plan resulted in a days filming that was disastrous even by our standards. The original idea is that Barry and Cues are heading through the countryside to get help and they run into a rabid, homicidal sheep that chases them through the paddocks until meeting an untimely death from a stray bazooka shell.
We went out to Caroline Cirdlestone's farm near Waikanae and set up to film with pet sheep borrowed from some friends of Caroline's. The sheep was a perfectly clean, well maintained pet so we had to try to scuzz it up a bit by throwing mud and pinning straggly bits of filthy wool to it to give it a kind of sheep gone punk sort of look. Pete at one point wanted it to wear an eye patch (which is a Monty Python reference) but that idea got dropped. We got the sheep all grungy and set up the shot. The sheep would be let loose and the crew would rush it making it run towards O'Herne and Craig who would run away looking terrified as though this dangerous beast was attacking them.
Pete gave O'Herne, Craig and the sheep their final instructions O'Herne and Craig were to keep looking behind them, note where the sheep was and try to stay in front of it. Action was called and the shot commenced. O'Herne and Craig started running straight ahead; the sheep was released, and immediately started running hell for leather for the hills! The sheep set some sort of land speed record with the crew in hot pursuit; it hit the fence line, started running alongside the fence and threw itself off a cliff!
We were all gob smacked thinking "Holy Shit, we've killed someone's beloved pet!" but it turned out the wasn't that high and the sheep survived it's plunge. lit was becoming clear that this sheep didn't have the slightest interest in the show business but, God help us all, we decided to try the shot again. We set up, this time with a crewmember off to the side to block the sheep heading in that direction, and called action. O'Herne and Craig trotted off; the sheep was released and shot off to the side again! Craig followed instructions and tried to stay in front of the sheep, O'Herne just lopped off into the distance and the sheep fled like a cat on fire with the crew hot on its tail. The sheep ran straight for the cliff again but proved itself smarter than it appeared and slammed on the brakes and ended up teetering on the edge of the cliff. It looked at us then at the cliff, then back at us then back at the cliff and gave the impression it was considering suicide rather than appear in our movie.
Anyway, we finally got the camera shy animal down from it's perch and made one of the only sensible decisions in the history of the making of BAD TASTE; we decided to scrap the flicking scene and go home.
As we loaded that goddamn sheep back into it's trailer to return it to it's life of obscurity Caroline Girdlestone got in the last word: she said 'Peter if this was a real movie we would've started training the sheep weeks ago!"
When the boys get recognized in pubs people always say you guys must've had a great time making BAD TASTE," but actually the experience was torture and it went on for years. We always seemed to shoot in winter and were always freezing our arses off (Craig, one bitterly cold day, announced he was wearing his wife's pantyhose. He claimed it was because of the cold but I ain't so sure). Because rain doesn't show up clearly on 16mm film we often shot in the rain (there's one shot where you can see it's raining). Since we mainly shot on Sundays the cast and crew (well, the cast was the crew) were usually seedy and hungover. And screw-ups, accidents and gaffes happened on a pretty much weekly basis. There was one Sunday where we all arrived at the location only to discover Pete had forgotten to bring any film (he rang his mum and she brought it out). There were a couple of days where no-one other than Pete could be stuffed
turning up and he had to turn around and go home again. There was a day when hardly anybody turned up and Pete had to get some kids on the beach to operate the camera crane, making ET probably the only movie in motion picture history to feature a crane shot where the crane was operated by nine year olds.
Perhaps most devastating psychologically for a splatter movie we were never able to get Derek's stinking chainsaw to go; we just dubbed in the sound of it going and used a smaller, newer saw for the shots of it actually cutting through things.
Finally, though,
after years of freezing cold Sundays, nervous breakdowns (Craig wasn't the only
one), wasted actors (you know who you are), cast desertions, amateur stuntwork,
homemade explosives, rooted chainsaws, run-ins with the law and a sheep that
took direction even worse than Terry Potter the filming of BAD TASTE was finally
wrestled into the dirt.
The film went into post-production and, like EL MARIACHI a few years later,
more money was spent on post-production than was spent on production. The film's
soundtrack was completely created in post; there isn't a single second of live
sound in the film. BT was mainly shot silent, there was some live sound recording
hut it wasn't that great and was scrapped. BT looked really ragged before it
was polished up, the quality of the post was such that it helped the film a
great deal.
BT got it's first screenings at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988 whore it's strong reception amazed the Film Commission. It then played sold out houses at the Wellington Film Festival with the boys in attendance. This was when being involved in the film finally became fun; seeing it at the Embassy Theatre with a shrieking, laughing, appreciative audience. And the other part of the filmmaking process I really enjoyed happened around then; we started making money from it.
BAD TASTE was a unique filmmaking experience. I always say that BT is Pete Jackson's film but if he had made it with a different group of people it would be a different movie. Maybe just as good but it wouldn't he BAD TASTE. Everyone who worked on the film, and the way it was shot, gave it a one of a kind character. I'm glad I was involved.
Thanks to Ken Hammon for writing his memories of Bad Taste
