Peter Jackson’s 1987 debut feature, Bad Taste, is now available to stream free on Plex. The low-budget science-fiction horror comedy is notable as an early example of the filmmaker’s appetite for elaborate practical effects, grotesque humour and energetic genre storytelling, years before he became widely known for The Lord of the Rings.

Shot on 16mm with friends and family on a very limited budget, the film follows agents from a fictional government service investigating an alien takeover of a New Zealand village. They discover that the aliens plan to harvest humans for an interstellar fast-food business, leading to increasingly graphic action and gore sequences; Jackson also appears as the character Derek. Bad Taste was followed by similarly unconventional early films including Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive, also known as Braindead.