I am very calm as I wait for Peter Jackson's King Kong, opening next week. Oh, I'm as a-tingle as I can be with anticipation, but I have every confidence in Jackson -- I know that Kong will be brilliant. Hell, after his triumph with The Lord of the Rings, Jackson could say, "Look, I wanna film an 18-hour opus of midgets juggling chainsaws while they read aloud from the Auckland phone book," and I'd say, "Okay, then. I'll be there." Because I know it would be genius.

It was a different story before LOTR -- I wondered who the hell this Jackson guy was, and how on Earth he thought he could get away with casting American actors as hobbits. And I'm not sure I would have felt any differently if I'd actually seen any of his pre-LOTR movies: there are hints of what was to come from him, but nothing to indicate that he could pull off a nine-hour, $300 million epic fantasy -- 12 hours, if you consider the extended editions. (After that, though, he could produce a mere three-hour giant-ape movie blindfolded and with one special-effects house tied behind his back.)

But, I figured, now was a great time to catch up with Jackson's films -- there aren't many, and they're all available on DVD, if not in the kind of completeist-happy packages the Tolkien flicks got. (I bet, though, that we'll soon seen a Peter Jackson Compendium box set, with all his older films and tons of goodies -- I bet the reason we haven't already seen such a thing is that he's been so consumed with LOTR and then Kong over the past few years.)

Jackson's first three flicks, in particular, are not exactly what you'd expect on the resume of the man who set Frodo on the cinematic road to Mount Doom: 1987's Bad Taste, 1989's Meet the Feebles, and 1992's Braindead (aka Dead Alive) are low-budget comic-horror grossouts, each one funnier and more hilariously disgusting than the last... and each one more assured and ingenious than the one before. With what looks like no budget at all, Jackson brings a dynamic flair and a distinct personality to Bad Taste, the story of "a bunch of extraterrestrial psychopaths" on the loose and killing indiscriminately -- the film is inventively yucky and visually witty. Jackson then took an artistic quantum leap to Meet the Feebles, a wickedly sordid tale of sex, drugs, and puppetry that features no human actors at all, just a band of anti-Muppets preparing for their big TV variety show with a stew of sodomy, gluttony, and shooting up (drugs or guns, take your pick). Not for the faint of heart -- this is a movie in the worst possible taste imaginable, and not everyone finds that kind of thing humorous -- it does nevertheless contain some elements that are, in retrospect, intriguing: on a large scale, Jackson's ability to work with inanimate "actors" and get sympathetic performances out of them; and on a small scale, there's a giant spider puppet here that looks like an early attempt at LOTR's Shelob.

Braindead is a zombie flick, sleeker and more sophisticated-looking than Jackson's prior films, and features a murderous monkey from, ahem, Skull Island (Jackson has said for years that the 1933 Kong was a major influence on him). Star Timothy Balme has a hint of Viggo Mortensen about him -- his meek Lionel couldn't be further from Aragorn, though, but the story of his triumphing over his domineering zombified mother lends the film a riotously funny Freudian sheen: here is a fantasy with a bit of depth to it. It may not be the most original theme -- man escapes the influence of his aggressively maternal mother -- but it does represent an evolution as a filmmaker and a storyteller on Jackson's part, without ever sacrificing the all-important and necessary gore and mayhem.

Jackson's later films may be somewhat more familiar to mainstream movie audiences: his 1994's Heavenly Creatures garnered lots of love and awards, and rightly so, particularly for its screenplay and for Kate Winslet, who was introduced to film audiences with this performance as a fantasy-crazed teenager who helped her best friend kill the other's mother. Based on a true story, it may be the least true-crime-y movie ever, thanks for Jackson's clever decision to dramatize the alterna-fantasy world the girls lived in as a bizarre, horrifying realm of creatures of clay. The Frighteners, from 1996 and starring Michael J. Fox, is a disappointingly conventional ghostbusters-type comic-horror story, but it does feature some innovative early CGI.

Perhaps Jackson's best pre-LOTR work is also the piece that is the most revealing about him as a filmmaker, if only inadvertantly so. Forgotten Silver, a 52-minute faux-documentary Jackson made in 1995 for New Zealand TV, is the "true" story of pioneering but unknown Kiwi filmmaker Colin MacKenzie, who trudged into the wild interiors of New Zealand to build enormous sets and shoot a four-hour Biblical epic employing thousands of extras and featuring massive battles. Any resemblance to the Peter Jackson of a few years later is, I'm sure, purely coincidental.

--MaryAnn Johanson
12.02.05