The now famous New Zealand director makes his debut with films that are still partially unknown today, shot with few means
The attention of the Italian public on the now famous New Zealand director Peter Jackson came on in 1994 when, after a Silver Lion for best direction at the Venice Film Festival, his work number four was successfully distributed: the visionary Heavenly Creatures, which amazed at the accuracy of the historical reconstruction , for his feminist instances of rebellion against conformity that even earned him comparisons with his compatriot Jane Campion, for some fantastic glimpses of an openly Gothic matrix, but above all for the surprising interpretation of the then eighteen year old and newcomer Kate Winslet.
Few would have imagined that a few years after Jackson would become the undisputed ruler of the global box office with the trilogies by JRR Tolkien (“The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit”), but hardly any of his new “orthodox” film fans suspected that his three previous films ( of which only the first had made a very fleeting appearance in the circuits) had been, in order: a science fiction gore in which a character (played by himself) ate his vomit, a sort of “Muppet Show” for adults and a saraband of zombies infected with a monkey carrying a virus.
Still partially misunderstood, the one composed by “Fuori di testa / Bad Taste” (1987), “Meet the Feebles (1989, still inexplicably unpublished by us) and” Splatters – Gli schizzacervelli / Braindead “(1992), in fact the Jackson’s first “trilogy” (sui generis); and the one with which the young nerd fan of fantastic cinema born on the night of Halloween in 1961 had given vent to all his iconoclastic and satirical madness before devoting himself to more ambitious and increasingly sophisticated forms of expression. Shot with very few means and a 16mm camera, his debut keeps perfectly faithful to the “bad taste” of his original title: and sees him grappling with the Time.news of the resistance to an invasion of aliens intent on procuring human flesh to be sold in a intergalactic fast food chain.
The second work, on the other hand, is a corrosive satire of the entertainment society made with repulsive animated puppets: where, among the many bizarre protagonists of the “Feebles” television show, severely tested by the illness of the host Harry (a rabbit with AIDS), there is a pornstar cow who exhibits the breasts in sado-maso gear, a heroin addict frog due to post-traumatic stress for the horrors seen in Vietnam and a horrible drug-trafficking walrus, kept under control by a gadfly reporter hunting for scoops who feeds on from a toilet bowl excrements by taking them with a teaspoon (beautiful metaphor for a part of our category).
The third film, which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary these days (it was presented in world preview on 4 June 1992 at the well-deserving Fantafestival in Rome), it still moves along the exaggerated, provocative and contaminated lines of the first two: but in filigree it already shows all the skills that will lead Jackson to manage spectacular machines that are increasingly original and complex. Set in New Zealand at the end of the 1950s, “Splatters – The brain squirts” sees the specimen of a monkey-rat coming from Skull Island (that is the imaginary ecosystem of which King Kong originates, a myth of the director who pushed him to make a remake-masterpiece in 2005), a disgusting hybrid animal originated according to a legend of primates raped by mice and the carrier of a virus capable of transforming humans into ravenous zombies.
To the misfortune of Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme), fatherless father who lives with oppressive and authoritarian mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody), his first victim in the city. If while alive he already hindered his son’s relationship with his girlfriend Paquita (Diana Pealver), dead (living) will prove to him an even worse nightmare than the infection that is inexorably spreading like wildfire. The result of an original screenplay signed by Jackson alone (although his wife Fran Walsh, married in 1987, had already begun to collaborate in the drafting of his scripts, which was then fundamental for his author’s evolution), the film is a festival of brutality and dismemberments. characterized by a bloodbath unprecedented in horror history; but where everything is also always tempered by a very acid black humor (streaked with evident oedipal veins), when not even by finding that update the mechanics of the slapstick to that of the splatter (and in this sense in its own way unforgettable for comic boldness the sequence in which -because the dissected parts of the zombies continue to live a life of their own here unlike in the “classics” of the genre – the severed sphincter of a victim of the infection is produced in a threatening flatulence).
Probably (a euphemism) not a work to be counted among those masterpieces that we often deal with on these columns. But also a film that over time has come to assume a singular importance: transcending its nature of extemporaneous divertissement dedicated to strong stomachs to become a posteriori, in its small way, the last possible example (and probably the most extreme) of the free one. horror aesthetics that had characterized the fundamental decade of the Eighties for the genre. A sort of footnote already out of time for a truly unrepeatable era and destined to be torn apart (just like the infected creatures that inhabit it) by that wave of progressive censorship and neoperbenism that is seeing its peak in our contemporary but whose roots are precisely in those nineties that Jackson opened (without followers) in the sign of an already inadmissible excess with a contemporary taste. Not surprisingly, when it was recovered from our distribution in 1995 (with a dubbing that denounced even the meaning of the dialogues: to be avoided) to capitalize on the director’s nascent reputation as a “serious” author, practically no one filed it here. .
June 2, 2022 (change June 2, 2022 | 07:39)
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