Trivia

The film started life as a ten-minute short called "Roast of the Day", which started shooting in 1981. The story concerned Giles ( Craig Smith ), an aid worker who comes to the small coastal town of Kaihoro on collection day. The young man encounters a psychopath named Robert who then pursues him. Giles escapes the madman and reaches an old heritage estate where he tries to contact the authorities. However, the same clan of cannibalistic psychos that Robert is from occupies the house and captures Giles. In an ironic twist the aid worker is later cooked up to relieve the famine of the cannibals. Along the way Peter Jackson added the "special forces" team that would be sent to rescue Giles, but in this early version the "boys" would turn out to be cannibals as well (they staged the whole thing because they like to play with their food). When it came time for Jackson to finally edit the film together he found that he had nearly 50 minutes' worth of usable footage. So with its length and being inspired by the 16mm efforts of Sam Raimi 's Tanz der Teufel (1981), Jackson continued shooting to make the movie a full-length feature. See more