The year: 1991.
The place: Video Park on the corners of Gettysburg and First St. in Fresno California.
The Time: Probably around 9:00 p.m., I can’t remember for certain, it was a long damn time ago, gimme a break.
The Why: My Friend Kai and I were out searching for another glorious gory movie to entertain our small group of gorehound friends.
The What: Bad Taste, directed by the then unknown, but soon to be a minor god in the church of gore, Peter Jackson.
So, it was a Friday night, around 9:00 p.m. in 1991, the year of our Discovery of Peter Jackson, at a Video Park in Fresno California (all of this can be verified by the facts above). Kai, my large half-Japanese/half-Anglo friend who often had clumpy dreadlocks died with Cool-aid for hair, and I were on a search for what we would soon call “The Holy Grail” of midnight movies. Like most Friday nights we would peruse the Horror and Sci-fi shelves of various video stores looking for the elusive “goriest film ever,” or the obscure “so freaking bad it’s brilliant” piece of cinematic trash, and this particular Friday was no different.
Pickings were becoming slim around town – we would often journey to uncharted territories and venture to the other side of the tracks to little no name video stores down in the Vietnamese district. However, on this particular Friday night we decided to play it safe and save some money on gasoline, it was after all $1.05 a gallon up ten whole cents from the previous week. Little did we know what was in store for us as we entered that Video Park, and I imagine if we did know we would not have believed it.
We were greeted with a smile from the cute checkout clerk, Debby was her name - I had a crush on her and her Cure t-shirts, (this was before Hollywood Video bought all of the Video Parks and the clerks could still maintain a little individuality and express their personality by wearing movie or music t-shirts) we said hello and proceeded to the Horror room. At this video store each genre section was in its own themed room or section. The Adult section was a room made up to look like a typical red-light district shop with satin curtains and swinging double-saloon doors, the Children’s section looked like a giant Lego castle, and the Horror section was in an old decrepit shack complete with a crypt inside that would open and close with a creek of a bony limb.
Once inside The Horror Shack, Kai and I took a gander at the shelves - we always started with “A”, and would continue to inspect every last video all the way through “Z” each and every time we frequented each video store. We could never be too careful, we could not take the chance that we might someday pass up something brilliant. On this night, this spectacular Friday night, it only took a few brief moments before our eyes were magically drawn to what appeared to be pure cinematic gold.
There, sitting on the shelves, in the “B” section was the most amazing sight I had ever seen. The room seemed to darken as a spot light shown upon the plastic clamshell video case. Kai and I heard what appeared to be an angelic choir of proclaiming something extraordinary. The cover was simply too amazing to be true. Had this video always been there? Had we overlooked its glory each and every time we had been there? Or, had some unknown entity snuck in and shelved this golden treasure unbeknownst to the employees of Video Park? Whatever the case, the VHS tape was there, plain to see, shimmering like a diamond amongst all of the other dirty pieces of coal.
An alien, or a guy in a plastic alien suit adorned the cover. Only this was no ordinary alien, no, this E.T. had an attitude. There he was, the most horrible rubber looking alien suit imaginable and the E.T. was clearly giving the camera the huge alien f-you finger. Even on distant planets, the finger still had meaning. Kai and I were shocked, amazed even. And there, written in bright yellow letters were the words “Bad Taste.” I reached for the VHS tape and as I touched it a surge of electricity sparked through my body causing me to shiver as the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Kai reached for the tape as well, we both caressed it as we stood in complete silence and reverence. Neither of us said a thing, nor did we need to – Kai looked at me, I looked at Kai, we both nodded our heads and proceeded to walk to the check out line, the tape securely in my grasp.
The ride home was silent and long, the tape lying in the bench seat between us in Kai’s giant International behemoth of a truck. The traffic lights seemed to work against us, we hit every red light between the video store and our friend Brian’s apartment. We finally reached our destination, I grabbed the tape and we walked slowly to Brian’s front door. We never knocked, just went in, and Kai quietly called for everyone’s attention. With our friend’s eyes all on us, I revealed from behind my back the tape of all tapes. Eyes widened, and jaws drop, slowly the crowd’s necks turned towards the VCR as I slowly walked over to it and inserted the videotape. I turned on the television, turned it to channel 3, sat down with the remote and pressed the most important button in my movie viewing life – play.
For the next hour and a half we were treated to the greatest things our eyes had ever seen. Here is just a small list of the splendid sights bestowed upon our retinas by Mr. Jackson:
A head exploded by a large pistol.
The exploded head falling onto a bloke’s leg gushing gore, blood and brains on his blue jeans.
A space zombie eating the gore out of the bowl shaped exploded head.
A space zombie getting his arm ripped off.
A space zombie getting beaten with the severed arm.
A guy falling off of a cliff and landing, head first, on a large rock.
Same guy losing part of his brain when his head cracks open.
A seagull comes and eats part of this guy’s brain.
Guy kills seagull, takes brain piece, shoves it back in his head and closes his head using his belt as a fastener.
A ceremony of space zombies throwing up in a bowl.
They then pass the bowl around, each taking a drink.
Lead space zombie escapes from the Earth in a flying house.
Lead space zombie gets killed by a guy falling on him with a chainsaw.
The guy with the chainsaw lands on space zombie’s face, cuts through his mouth, throat, body and continues to chainsaw through the space zombie finally coming out through his ass.
Again, these are only some of the images we saw – but need I say, it was the single greatest thing we had ever witnessed. As the final credits rolled we all just sat there, in silence, our mouths open and our eyes wide with amazement. Someone in the corner was crying, and someone on the couch sat there holding his knees rocking slowly, muttering gibberish, he was too shocked to speak. Kai looked to me, as if to say, “My God D, what have we done?” I too looked at Kai, as huge smiles appeared on our faces. I started laughing, Kai started laughing, and Brian started laughing. Soon everyone was laughing, clapping, high five’n, and reliving every moment of the spectacular piece of cinema we had just witnessed.
That Friday night was a magical moment in my life – a turning point if you will. It was one of those great rare moments when I judged a book, or video in this case, by its cover and the cover proved to be more than true. It was also a rare moment where we had discovered something unknown to most. You see, in a time before the Internet, we film geeks had to rely on our senses to weed the good from the bad from the awful. During this time it was possible to truly discover something that was new, and not talked about by many people.
We couldn’t just go to horrordvds.com, or the IMDB, or Rotten Tomatoes to get suggestions or look for recommendations by other genre fans. No, we had to brave the trenches and the stenches of lesser video stores, actually browsing the racks for something great. It was also a time before DVDs, a time when more often than not, the quality of the product was lacking. Often times the good stuff had been “eaten” by some idiot’s VCR, or they were on copies dozens of generations old. The times were tough for us gorehounds, but the times were also more rewarding. Every once in a great while, every blue moon you might say, we would stumble upon something that would make all the searching worth while. Every so often we would come across a film like Bad Taste and we would sit back and enjoy 2 hours of cinematic bliss. It’s just too bad that these instances don’t happen more often.
