Bad Taste: Peter Jackson, The WWE Intercontinental Championship, and Billy Corgan

 

 *Blog post started on October 16, 2020.

My three day weekend cannot come soon enough. The Staley blog network (NinetyForChill.com, MainEventOfTheDead.com, Russ's Remnants of Anime, and Disgruntled Real Championship Wrestling) are scheduled out to early November, so it will be a nice change of pace to not keep stockpiling content. The biggest problem for my blogs right now is a dependence upon wrestling content.

And with that said, I may as well address recent championship title changes in pro wrestling. "Bad Taste" is in the title of this blog post, and that is the general consensus of what people think the fans of that industry have. My personal taste says we fans should lean into that more, but when I suggest the Katie Vick was a fun angle, that opinion maybe disqualified.

As a horror and occasional raunchy comedy fan, I respect when the creators take something further than what the audience considers far enough. If Triple H did not toss the brains at the end of the funeral parlor segment, my thoughts about the angle would be that it was in poor taste. Once that poor taste has been taken to the bad realm, the imagination of the audience has been destroyed. To gain that kind of control is something I admire.

For my argument with Billy Corgan over poor versus bad taste, visit MainEventOfTheDead.com.

Why is the Intercontinental Championship a part of the blog title? Because the recent Sami Zayn angle behind it was done in bad taste. How do you end up stripping a champion because of COVID-19, but Brock Lesnar was never rushed to defend his championships over the past six years?

Is the Intercontinental Championship greater than the TNT Championship? See why it is not be visiting DRCWwrestling.blogspot.com.

The 149th Disgruntled's Real Ocho Champion

AEW TNT Champion Cody (3) (10/7/20).

It is tempting to declare Zayn as the champion because of the length of his reign, but again, he did not start his reign with a great win. Three-on-one handicap match against the champion versus a dog collar blood bath: Cody's title victory is the superior.

A blood bath serves as a perfect transition into how I finally got around to Peter Jackson's debut directorial effort, "Bad Taste". The prior night, I revisited the failed lesbian take on the already pretentious "Dead Poets Society", Canada's "Lost and Delirious". It ended up being a downer of a film on top of that, so I needed something to cleanse my pallet. "Young Adult" is still a disc that I need to open, but as a depressed writer, I did not think the feature was right to bounce back from patriarchal bullshit (The only valid thing about "Lost and Delirious outside a Graham Greene supporting role is that it took place in the current day, so making it about accepting teenage lesbians at an up tight boarding school a good premise.).

As I looked through my unwatched DVD's and Blu-rays, "Young Adult" was the only film under 97 minutes. Anything purchased on iTunes was either foreign or experimental, so I did not know if I had the attention span for those. So I turned to Amazon Prime's offerings, and "Bad Taste" beat out "Night of the Demons" as my choice to add to my 90-minute movie data base.

Was there really a choice between these two "classics"? It is an Academy Award winner B-movie versus the guy who directed the sequel to Charlie Sheen's "The Arrival". To director Kevin Tenney's credit, his movie called "Brain Dead" from 2007 did help inspire me to write my B-movie script, "Main Event of the Dead". Email russthebus07@gmail.com with any questions about my production.

Bad Taste

The Astro Investigation and Defense Service (a joke that may have been ahead of its time) is investigating the town of Kaihoro, New Zealand. There seems to be no locals present, just a group of men in identical blue work shirts and jeans. Barry and Derek are the advance team. 

Barry is quick to capture one of these men while Derek is being tracked by an axe-wielding simpleton who he destroys with his magnum. Based on the reaction the two have received upon arrival, Barry is certain these are not friendly aliens with glowing fingers but extra terrestrials who intend to end humanity. It is a good thing their action-loving team members Frank and Ozzy (Is this a Muppet joke?) are en route to this town.

With all this ruckus, a gang of these aliens mount a counter attack which results in Barry taking a fall that leaves him with a compound fracture of the skull. The team writes him off, but the persistence of Barry allows him to figure out ways to keep his brain matter in his cranium, but perhaps at the cost of his sanity. Unfortunately, our heroes cannot leave because a charity collector, Giles, had arrived before Frank and Ozzy could block the roads into town.

Giles is soon captured, so the boys are set on rescuing him. As they infiltrate the alien base, they discover what has happened to the town folk. The aliens represent Crum's Country Delights and they have decided that human beings will be the dish that will make them competitive in the intergalactic fast food market once again. Kaihoro maybe lost, but there is no way the AIDS team is going to let Lord Crum and his cronies introduce this new menu item to space car hops.

"Bad Taste" is a very cheap slash-stick comedy which is very amateur in nature, but successfully shows there is a great director behind it. Peter Jackson shot this film over four years on weekends and the New Zealand film board took notice of his dedication. The result is a great exercise in practical gore effects while being more amusing and easier for the squeamish to stand than the similar efforts of Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead".

This film was a passion project of Jackson who knew this feature just had to get made. He was going to give audiences a bad film though, so his clever direction allows us to forgive the features shortcomings. It is more than apparent that Jackson lacked the means to produce high art, but his short cuts allow the audience to be in on the joke that these cheats are.

Until the finale, the action starts as being a little too sloppy for its own good. It starts to feel long, but the once a chainsaw-wielding psychopath is introduced, it finds its groove and becomes a ball until the gory climax that was repeated in "Dead Alive" and was missing from all of his features after (I may need to rewatch "The Frighteners" and "Heavenly Creatures" to confirm the lack of rebirth sequences.). Darn PG-13 and its limitations.

Excellent gore, a John Carpenter styled soundtrack, and the sheer absurdness of "Bad Taste" make this feature a classic. The film becomes more polished as it moves along (probably because of the New Zealand government funding), so it feels like you are learning about film makings alongside the great auteur Peter Jackson. It also leaves you missing the gory beauty that he was producing, but would you trade it for "The Lord of the Rings Trilogy? With the sheer amount of false endings in "Return of the King", perhaps.