Bad Taste (1987)

Director: Peter Jackson

It is only when one watches Peter Jackson’s early films that you are awe struck by the fact that a production company would entrust massive amounts of money to him to make the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is a leap of faith of epic proportions. These early works are generally juvenile and poorly made, but they do have something about them that make them strangely endearing.

In Bad Taste a group of aliens has landed on earth and has harvested an entire town full of people in order to take them back and use them as the new Fast Food on their planet. Luckily there is a government team that is assigned to investigate. It then turns into an all out blood bath between man and alien.

Law in bad taste:

1. As always when there is a government entity that has legal authority over extraterrestrials we get an issue of metalaw. No one in the film really worries about it as they commence to kicking alien butts (which are real saggy).

2. The Government agency is authorized to use violence when there is a threat to the Earth or the Moon. This could be a question of space law. Can the “peaceful purposes” clause in the Outer Space Treaty be breached in order to defend the moon against human eating aliens (maybe that’ll be in part two)?

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An American Haunting (2005)

Director: Courtney Solomon

So, if you are looking for a bad Valentine’s Day pick for next year, I’ve found it for you. American Haunting is a spectacularly unclever horror flick that is full of cheap cliched camera angles and tricks. The plot is miserable and serves, instead of making for frightened, “protect me” snuggles, to make the viewers some what disgusted not to mention bored. Luckily (and this is rare) I didn’t pick this particular viewing experience out, so it was all her fault.

An American Haunting purports to tell the story of the Bell Witch, a local Tennessee legend. It goes way back to pre-Civil War days and tells the story of a family suffering from a poltergeist like curse that they think has been placed on them by an angry tenant. The curse is actually from somewhere a little deeper and darker though.

Cursed law:

1. The initial action occurs at a church trial in which the head of the family, John (Donald Sutherland), is found guilty of usury as a result of his charging twenty percent interest on a loan. The sentence, though, is a little lighter than the oppossing party would like (she got to keep the land and John’s good name was ruined, but she was not reimbursed for the timber he cut), so she curses the family.

2. It turns out that the real curse is from John’s breaking a taboo that could be better defined under natural law than canon law, though.

3. Reference is made twice to the “pound of flesh” judgement in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

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