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Peter Jackson Retrospective |
When better a time to review and revive the great early films of staunch New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson than now, with the world clamouring for the release of the first installment in his Lord of the Rings trilogy this December?
MUFF is proud to present in 2001 the first three features by the only man ever to have almost remade King Kong in Auckland. Along with Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead, MUFF will also screen Jackson's underseen, very funny and provocative documentary Forgotten Silver, made with Costa Botes for TVNZ in downtime before his first foray in bringing Hollywood to New Zealand, The Frighteners, and just after his crossover success with the gorgeous but still macabre Kate Winslet-introducing Heavenly Creatures.
An amazing talent from the get-go, going behind the scenes of his earliest films shows the other quality that led to his getting LOTR off the ground in his very own backyard – an extraordinary bloody-mindedness. MUFF will present two Jackson makings-of to round out the retrospective, Good Taste Made Bad Taste, being the making of his cult classic debut, and Sex, Drugs and Soft Toys, the making-of of his notorious and polarising 2nd feature Meet the Feebles.
Much could be written here about this rare stalwart Australasian filmmaker, born auspiciously on Halloween, in 1961 - but as you'll come across his biographical details in droves towards the end of this year, we'll forgo this.
Jackson's hilarious feature debut, filmed across almost literally something like six months of Sundays, is the ludicrous and thin tale of a gormless foursome's attempt to rid the world of aliens who've come to Earth to plunder its human population for fast food. Chief amongst the four is the cranially challenged loose cannon Derek (a young, thin Jackson himself), subject after a plummet off a cliff face to great troubles keeping his brains inside his head.
Bad Taste will screen with Good Taste Made Bad Taste to follow Thursday 12 July 9pm, Treasury Theatre
"Do you really think people are interested in nasal sex?"
Not unlike the Muppets on acid inside Andy Warhol's Factory as a soap opera in Weimar Berlin. The sleaziest group of puppets you're ever likely to come across. This is Jackson's great satirical tribute to the decadence that we all knew was behind the façade of family fun of those creatures we all sang along with and hugged and loved as children. Heidi, the prima donna hippo is losing her moxie and her figure while her Producer boyfriend Bletch, a walrus, is getting some loving from a Siamese cat. While the show must of course go on, backstage, a panty-sniffing elephant's facing a paternity suit from some poultry, a rat's directing pornos in the basement, the show's MC, a hare, is literally going to pieces, the amphibian knife-thrower's
suffering from withdrawal and 'Nam flashbacks and a journalist, literally a "fly on the wall", is chasing the shit down the toilet bowl for a good story.
Meet the Feebles will screen with Sex, Drugs and Soft Toys to follow Thursday 12 July 7pm, Treasury Theatre
The very zenith of comedy horror, the ultimate "splatstick" flick, the grandest of Grand Guignol. As if Daphne du Maurier introduced Buster Keaton to Lucio Fulci in 1950s Wellington, they pooled together their pocketmoney and made a helluva film. Timothy Balme is milquetoast Lionel, in thrall to his termagant mother. His budding romance with Paquita, an "oily shopgirl" coincides with his fiercely disapproving Mother falling grossly, horrendously ill after a reconnaissance trip to the zoo involved a grisly tete-a-tete with a Sumatran rat-monkey.
Valley of the Stereos, a short directed by Heavenly Creatures' digital effects operator George Port and co-produced by Peter Jackson will screen before Braindead Friday 6 July 9pm, Treasury Theatre
Brilliant documentary offers many a jaw-dropping revelation as the apocryphal works of an early New Zealand filmmaker are excavated, and so call for a wholesale revision of history – and not just cinema history at that! Film critic Leonard Maltin, Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein and Sam Neill join Peter Jackson before the camera to testify to the merits of the astonishing pioneering work of Colin McKenzie, with Jackson even heading a team through thick South Island wilderness in search of one of McKenzie's more epic sets…
Unmissable, and with a forum to follow, Sunday 8 July 9pm, Kaleide
Chris Howard and Matt Boyle.
Bad Taste (1987) (R)
Witness wonderfully wooden acting alongside extraordinarily ingenious, ambitious and gratifyingly squelchy scenes and set-pieces of wholly gratuitous gore.
Things explode. Bodies are dismembered, dismantled and reconfigured. Tools are used. Power tools are used. Pythonesque prosthetic mayhem abounds. There are aliens.
Jackson actually appears in two roles in the film – this, on top of his credits as director, writer, producer, cinematographer, special effects creator and editor.
Meet the Feebles (1989) (M)
The first ever "spluppet" movie, and a great simulacra of a hidden camera documentary on what really goes on once the curtain goes down. Maybe those jokes about Kermit and Miss Piggy are funny because they're true…
Braindead (1992) (R)
Suffice it to say that one thing leads to another leads to zombies galore!
And a more amazing array of bodily dismemberments, reanimations, bodily fluid-letting, walking viscera and comical carnage the like you have never seen, or, some would say, should never see at all…
Add a little stop-motion, some kung-fu, the odd startle, some enthusiastic zombie sex, hyperactive camera work, disturbing use of a dessert, overt Freudianism, a drooling Jackson cameo and a tour-de-force splatter finale, and that's still just scraping the surface…
Forgotten Silver (1996) (with co-director Costa Botes)
Astonishingly, this hour-long doco has only surfaced the twice (?) before in Australia, receiving a Paul Lyneham-introduced airing on Channel Nine and a brief season on Optus Vision.