Meet the Feebles (1989)

Peter Jackson, despite the Lord of the Rings things he did, will always hold a special place in my heart. After my friends and I found Bad Taste in 1994, we were converts, and we looked for anything we could find by him. We found this and Dead Alive, and both were spectacular. I never quite got the buzz around the LOTR films, because none of them could stand up to these first three in my mind.

Meet the Feebles is a sick and twisted parody of The Muppets. The Feebles is a variety show owned by this walrus dude. He's supposed to be in love with the hippo chick that's their star singer, but he bangs a cat on the side. At the same time, the star rabbit thinks he's got a fatal STD, and is planning his death. Our protagonist is supposed to be a diminutive porcupine who has just joined the cast. As more and more problems plague the production, the gay fox that runs the show decides to do his own act, a song about sodomy. The hippo finds out the walrus doesn't love her, and she snaps, massacring the cast with a machine gun.



Like Bad Taste and Dead Alive, this film is pure comedic gold. You know this isn't your-run-of-the-mill puppet film when you see a walrus doing a cat. There's also a rat who films bondage porn in the basement on the side, and a fly who runs a gossip column. Like Team America and Conan's sketch about puppet deaths, Peter Jackson does a great job killing off the puppets in his film. The hippo with the machine gun is fantastic.

Also like Bad Taste and Dead Alive, this film is not for the faint of heart. Don't let the puppet theme fool you, there are plenty of disgusting scenes in this, some grosser than those in the other two films. You've got the fly eating feces in a toilet, the rabbit with pus oozing out of the sores on his face, and the walrus vomiting on a rhino to screw up his golf shot.



This is not a kids film either. The humor is purely adult fare. One of my faves was the Deer Hunter tribute with the lizard who was captured in Vietnam and now fights a heroin addiction. I also dug the aforementioned sodomy song. Anyone who looks at the puppets on the cover and thinks Dark Crystal or Muppets Take Manhattan will be sorely disappointed (unless you're me, and you have a twisted sense of humor, and think those two movies sucked ass).

Pay whatever you have to to get this gem. If it sets you back the full $19.99, it's so worth it. This thing will provide many more hours of enjoyment than all of the LOTR special editions put together.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097858/

Braindead aka Dead Alive (1992)

After experiencing the masterpiece that was Bad Taste, we were eager to see more of Jackson's work. The Internet was rather new to us then, so it took a while to get a good filmography of him. Eventually (like six months later), we found this. It did not disappoint.

Jackson followed up his success in Bad Taste with Dead Alive, a zombie movie about a guy whose mom's bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey, and rises from the dead. As in most zombie films, the problem spreads, and more people become undead. The guy tries to keep them all locked in his basement to stem the tide, with no success. Two zombies hook up and make a baby, which the guy takes for a walk, and then has to beat against a tree. Great zombie action.

This movie was simply awesome. Maybe the greatest zombie picture ever. It's definitely up there with Night of the Living Dead. It lived up to the reputation Jackson had built with what I termed The New Zealand Citizen Kane, also known as Bad Taste. No one's pulled off campy horror better than Jackson.



Unlike his earlier effort, though, the special FX in this one are even better. It's gorier and sicker, and we love every minute of it. One of the best moments was the Lawnmower Scene. As part of a party scene, which was one of the goriest and funniest ever, a man takes a lawnmower, lifts it up, and runs through some zombies with it. It's fucking beautiful. A buddy showed it for a project on Moby Dick in his junior English class. I was so mad I wasn't there to see it.

There's a priest in it, and when the zombies attack him, he exclaims: "I kick ass for the lord!" He whips out these karate moves, and almost takes out all of them before he's bitten and becomes one too. He then sleeps with a female one and a zombie child is born. I don't remember zombies having kids in any other film, but the zombie baby in this one was pure comedic genius. The guy takes it for a walk, but it acts up, and he starts to fight with it. No one else knows it's a zombie, so they think he's beating his child. It sounds horrible, but Jackson pulls it off so well.



It's too bad Jackson has gone away from his roots in doing the Lord of the Rings and King Kong movies. We as fans of bad horror and horror spoofs are left wanting. There really isn't anyone out there other than Sam Raimi that does this better, and he's doing Spiderman. Jackson has a keen insight and sense of satire that's missing in his newer, bigger films. I don't want to come off as That Guy who only likes a dude when he's obscure, but can't like him when he's famous, I just think it's weird that he made his name on these great horror films, and now he's abandoned the genre. We need him to save us from the Saw 41's and The Hills Have Eyes 37's.

Either way, this is a must have for any horror fan. If it costs you $20, pay it. It doesn't get much better.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103873/

Bad Taste (1987)

In 1994, when I was between my Freshman and Sophomore years of high school, a group of friends I had that all shared in my love of MST3K decided to have a party where we rented a bunch of movies and made fun of them, just like Joel and the 'Bots. One friend had the vision, the genius, the je ne sais quois to pick this gem. I remember it like it was yesterday. He carried the box over to me, and said "Look, one review said: 'Your VCR will cry out for windshield wipers!' "

And so Bad Taste entered my life. Within the first five to ten minutes of watching the movie, we realized this wasn't the bad horror film we could just make fun of. This was something completely different-- the Citizen Kane of New Zealand. 

Of course, roughly ten years after we'd seen it, the film's director, writer, and star, Peter Jackson, graduated from the DTV ranks and made the Lord of the Rings trilogy. People seemed to like those movies, but for me, they pale in comparison to this, Dead Alive, and Meet the Feebles. For now we are dealing strictly with Bad Taste.

If you haven't seen it, Bad Taste is about an alien fast food chain that takes over and slaughters a small town in New Zealand. A group of government agents who specialize in extraterrestrials have come to investigate, and defend our planet. There's Frank, the cigar smoking, fearless leader; Ozzy, who has a personality disorder; Barry, who's got a Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon sort of "I'm too old for this shit" sensibility; and of course, Peter Jackson plays Derek, the dorky one who's a tad sadistic. 

Things get messy for the guys when Derek takes a dive off a cliff, and a charity collection guy named Giles is kidnapped for the aliens' final feast. The remaining three guys have to swoop into the mansion the aliens are using for their headquarters and snatch Giles. They get Giles, but a gun fight ensues, and the boys barely make it out alive. Ozzy decides to go back and finish the aliens off, and Frank agrees to join him. At the same time Derek comes back into the battle after fixing his head, and he's armed with a chainsaw. The denouement was probably the most amazing finale since Peckinpah's Wild Bunch. Like Tina Turner once said it's: "Simply the Best!"

Well, after that night, Bad Taste was instantly our favorite movie. We had to make a copy of the video store's VHS because we couldn't find it for sale anywhere. We even made an audio copy so we could listen to it in the car. We quoted it everywhere. This was the pinnacle for us, as good as it gets. 

There were so many memorable moments, I know I'll miss some. There was the brain eating scene, where Peter Jackson in another role plays an alien eating out of the head of a fallen comrade. The head rip scene was great too, where Ozzy rips an alien's head off with it's spine dangling off it, then sets it down, rips the spine off, takes the head, punts it out the window, and says "the old magic's still there." Right after that, Frank goes undercover to see what the aliens are up, and ends up stuck in a ritual where the Peter Jackson alien vomits into a salad bowl and everyone has to eat it--including Frank. You've got Derek losing part of his brain out of the back of his head, and putting it back in and securing the head with his belt. For many, the best is when Frank fires a rocket from his launcher right through the mansion, into the field out back, and blows up a sheep. 

For the longest time the only copies of this great we had were ones we pirated from the one at the video store. With the advent of DVD, we now own this in the form of a limited edition, high quality transfer. Recently my younger brother went through my collection, and he and his friends watched it, without my mentioning it. It just shows the universality of the beauty in art like that.

This is a must buy for anyone who doesn't have it. This is one of the very few where I say pay the full $19.99. This is one of the few where I say buy it new. It's that good. Now that Jackson has become a celebrated director, this movie is not the hidden gem it was back in 1994. Just the same, I'd be remiss in making a DTV blog, and not discussing one of the best.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092610/

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