Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Before he made gigantic budgeted movies, Peter Jackson directed, wrote, shot, produced and co-starred in this movie that sees aliens using our planet for fast food.

After the New Zealand town of Kaihoro disappears, Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) agents Derek (Peter Jackson), Frank (Mike Minett), Ozzy (Terry Potter) and Barry (Pete O’Herne) are assigned to see what happened, finding aliens that love to eat humans. A battle breaks out and Derek falls off a cliff, but survives with his brain leaking out, covered by a hat.

An insurance adjuster named Giles Copeland (Craig Smith) is taken by the aliens and put in a bathtub stew before being saved by the men. What follows is non-stop violence, as Derek’s brain keeps pouring out of the hole in his head, leading to him grabbing a chainsaw and killing the space monsters, including boarding their ship to home, replacing his brains with an alien one and sawing their leader Lord Crumb (Doug Wren in the suit, Dean Lawrie as the double and Peter Vere-Jones as the voice, as Wren died during the four years this took to make) to bits as he flies directly at the alien homeworld, ready for war.

Using a 25-year-old 16mm Bolex camera, inspired by Tom Savini and wild enough to shoot a scene where he fights himself in two different roles, Jackson went wild on this, even baking the alien masks in his mother’s oven. He’d follow this with Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead, two more movies that are out of control compared to the rest of his movies. He wouldn’t have to invent his own steadicam for the movies that followed after this.

When this came out, it was a hard to find film and you know, it still is — at least in the U.S. — today. While there’s almost no budget, this movie is incredibly inventive and still worth watching today, so long after it was originally made. These aliens don’t have a glowing finger, as the movie says, but in the U.S., the VHS box came with an extra finger sticker so that people wouldn’t be upset that the alien was flipping them off.