Peter Jackson’s blue-shirted zombie comedy Bad Taste (1987) was, surprisingly, not the first sicko splatter flick to stumble out of New Zealand. That honour goes to Davd Blyth’s no-budget gorefest, wherein a mad scientist hypnotises a young man to shoot his parents, and on his release, the kid goes after the old man in his zombie-ridden island laboratory. With plenty of flying gore played for shock/comic effect (including our old friend Bruno Lawrence as a hunchbacked zombie whose head explodes), it plays like a slightly more warped version of a Peter Jackson film. If such a thing is possible.
