Peter Jackson's preparing 4K restorations of his righteously revolting early movies
If you’re struck by the special effects wizardry Peter Jackson dealt in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy or King Kong, you’d be wise to dig into his back catalogue of gross-out horror, where the director made honest-to-god magic without the deep pockets of a studio. Bad Taste and Dead Alive are disgusting, hilarious, and still, all these years later, kind of a visual marvel.
Unfortunately, all that ingenuity is undercut somewhat by the low-definition quality of the existing versions, which may as well be born from water-damaged VHS tapes. That’s about to change, however, as Jackson just revealed to The Empire Film Podcast that 4K restorations of those two films, as well as his queasy, puppet-filled Meet The Feebles, are finally on the way.
“Anything from those films that is available is, like, 1990s Telecine things, which is the best that we had… compared now, they look bloody awful,” Jackson said. “I just haven’t re-released them because, if I do, I want them to look really good. We’ve actually done some experiments. They look bloody fantastic. They look like they’re shot on 35mm.”
He adds that the plan is to “get really nice 4K copies of these fully restored and back out into circulation again,” which should set the sick, pulsating hearts of gorehounds aflutter.