To say that Bad Taste was made by the director of Lord of the Rings is a lot like saying that the original Evil Dead was made by the director of the Spider-Man trilogy. Both statements are technically true, but totally misleading.

Yes, like so many other great directors before and after him, Peter Jackson started out making no-budget horror films with his friends. The first of them was Bad Taste, which stars the least convincing paramilitary unit I’ve ever seen in cinema. They’re the Astro Investigation and Defense Service (they really need a new name), sent to deal with an alien menace that’s come to harvest human flesh for an intergalactic fast food chain. And as you might have guessed from the title, a whole lotta sickening stuff ensues.

From an objective point of view, there’s little denying that this isn’t a good movie. The cinematography looks like garbage, the editing is a joke, the acting is extremely hammy, the score is terribly cheesy, the screenplay has nothing that resembles a coherent structure, the lines are out of sync with their lip movements more often than not, and the action (particularly the shootouts) doesn’t look the least bit convincing.

There’s really only one thing this movie does well, but it’s something this movie does extremely well: The makeup.

Not only are the makeup effects and fake gore really good in this movie, but they’re executed with a juvenile sense of humor and a vividly sick creativity. A certain bowl of steaming vomit comes to mind. There’s also a running gag involving a man whose brains keep falling out. Perhaps the best of them all is the manner in which the main villain is defeated, which is something I don’t dare spoil here.

Honestly, there’s really not much else to say. It’s a very short movie — only 91 minutes — and there’s no thematic content whatsoever, much less any worth discussing. When all is said and done, it all comes back to the statement that this is a technically horrible film, though it has a staggering amount of creativity that’s presented remarkably well for a no-budget amateur film. It’s obvious that unlike so many other godawful Z-list movies, this one was made with some amount of filmmaking talent.

I’m almost tempted to wonder what this movie might have been like with a bigger budget, but that would undoubtedly decrease the movie’s charm by a considerable margin. Moreover, the lack of budget actually makes the film more tense, since it means that there couldn’t have been any halfway-decent safety measures taken on set. That’s worth remembering through the scenes that were filmed on sheer cliffs, or when an actor is running alongside a moving vehicle.

For all its faults, Bad Taste shows a fiendishly clever and gleefully nasty side to Peter Jackson that I hadn’t seen before. I don’t know where this aspect of him as a filmmaker went over the past couple of decades, but I’d like to see it again someday. As to whether or not I’d recommend it, that depends on your position relative to the sharp dividing line between filmgoers who enjoy campy schlock and those who don’t.

In this case, it boils down to a simple question: Would you enjoy seeing Peter Jackson — a future Oscar-winning auteur — using a spoon to eat brains from a freshly-dead skull?