Peter Jackson's Best Movies (That Aren't Lord of the Rings), Ranked
If I could request the universe or some other higher power to see to it that one trilogy is never rebooted, reinterpreted or reimagined, either on the big screen or as a prestige TV show, I don’t think I’d be alone in choosing Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.
The amiable Kiwi achieved such an unbelievable level of perfection with those beloved movies that we’ve basically given him a free pass for all those Hobbit things. With those six lengthy projects as director (plus a producer credit on the upcoming Hunt for Gollum), only J.R.R. Tolkien himself can claim to have played a bigger role in shaping the world of Middle-earth in the popular imagination, and yet Jackson has still found the time in his career to add a variety of other strings to his bow. As the filmmaker attended Cannes this month to receive the festival’s honorary Palme d’Or, what better time to shine a light on those other achievements?
In the list below, assembled in ascending order, you’ll find all nine features that Jackson has directed outside of The Lord of the Rings — a veritable murderers' row of movies that contains gruesome B-movie thrills, real-life murderous teenagers, the biggest ape in cinema history, and the biggest band in history, full stop.
Read on to learn a bit more about each one and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
If you’re looking for the most batshit project of Peter Jackson’s career, I recommend checking out Meet the Feebles, a movie that blends comedy, puppetry, horror and rock opera into a cinematic mashup that splits the difference between the movies of Jim Henson, the gross-out glee of The Toxic Avenger and the glam of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The story follows a troupe of animals — led by Heidi the Hippopotamus — whose vulgar behaviour resulted in the movie being marketed in some countries with the tagline “From the director of Bad Taste comes a movie with no taste at all.” Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
After directing all three LOTR films and King Kong in a six-year tornado of creativity, Jackson took a brief and long-overdue hiatus from filmmaking before returning in 2009 with The Lovely Bones. To O.G. Jackson fans, this literary adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel looked like it might offer a return to the more earthly delights of movies like Heavenly Creatures, but for one reason or another, it failed to really click.
Perhaps Sebold’s story of a murdered girl (played by a then 14-year-old Saoirse Ronan) looking over her family from heaven was just a little too Christian-coded for comfort. Whatever the case, there is plenty in here to enjoy — not least the images (by Jackson’s regular D.P. Andrew Lesnie) and an original score from none other than Brian Eno.
One of the various things that connects Jackson to other trailblazing effects filmmakers like George Lucas and James Cameron is just how obsessed with that process he became in the years that followed LOTR.
Jackson’s Weta studios have been responsible for the look and feel of plenty of great Hollywood movies in the last 20 years, but arguably Jackson’s greatest technical achievement in recent years has been restoring and (in some cases) recolourising old and never-before-seen footage.
The most famous example of this to date comes a little later on our list, but Jackson’s 2018 documentary on the First World War, titled They Shall Not Grow Old, offers a similarly transportative viewing experience. If you have any interest in that period of history, it’s a fascinating watch.
Given how successful Jackson went on to be as a blockbuster filmmaker, it’s strange to think that The Frighteners, his first experience with a Hollywood studio, was a bit of a box office disaster. Jackson has always attributed this to the film being released during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, but looking back on it now, it’s probably just as likely that audiences didn’t quite know what to make of the movie’s mix of dark comedy and supernatural horror.
Luckily for us, we have 30-years of hindsight and a solid grasp of Jackson’s tastes and personality as a filmmaker — all of which makes this Michael J. Fox-starring tale of ghosts, mediums and murder all the more fun to watch. If you’re into movies like The Evil Dead and Poltergeist, I recommend you do just that.
Almost 40 years since its release, Peter Jackson’s debut movie, Bad Taste, is still a deliriously fun and gory piece of work. Made for just $25k, it centres on a showdown between a team of commandos and a group of alien invaders who are attempting to harvest the people of a fictional New Zealand town into fast food.
There’s not a huge amount to say about it really, but if you like your B-movies as gruesome as they are inventive (think stuff like The Fly, The Blob, or — again — Evil Dead), you’re gonna have a pretty good time with it.
It’s kind of a joke to think back to the first few years of this century, a time when movie-goers were treated to a new Harry Potter and a new Lord of the Rings movie every Christmas. Jackson, of course, filmed the majority of his trilogy over one gigantic shoot from 1999 to 2000, but with all the post-production, marketing, and awards obligations that followed — all the way up to his Best Director and Best Picture win for Return of the King in 2004 — we’d have forgiven him for taking a bit of a sabbatical in the years that followed.
All of which made his epic return with King Kong in 2005 all the more shocking. This was the second reboot of the 1933 classic after John Guillermin’s version in 1976, but the first to approach the story with the tricks and tools of CGI, which proves to be a bit of a blessing and a curse. If you’re willing to look past some of the digital sequences that haven’t aged quite so well, however, Jackson’s abilities as a storyteller easily shine through all the pixels.
Five years after Bad Taste, Jackson returned with one of the great zombie schlock-fests. Set in South Wellington, Braindead is basically a story about a young man trying to bury his mother before anyone notices that she’s been bitten by a rat-monkey hybrid and is turning into a member of the ravenous undead.
This is a movie with jokes about necrophilia and in which a character called Father McGruder gets to utter the immortal line, “I kick arse for the lord.” If that sounds like something you might enjoy, I highly recommend seeking it out.
This one was a little tricky, as the length and matter-of-factness of Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back probably makes it closer to a TV show than a movie — if not just a time capsule of impossibly vivid archival material.
And yet, seeing as a great many people decided to immerse themselves in all eight hours of it during lockdown, I think it deserves to be looked at as a solid, single thing. This is a documentary about The Beatles that, similar to Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, transports the viewer to the recording studio as they work on what would become their final album. If you are any kind of fan of The Beatles’ music, here’s a chance to experience what it might’ve been like to be in the room.
There are so many reasons to recommend Heavenly Creatures, it’s kind of difficult to know where to start. The story alone — a ripped-from-the-headlines true crime tale about two teenage girls who murder one of their mothers — is fascinating enough, but it’s the manner in which Jackson tells it that makes this movie so unique. Add to that the star-making performances of Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet (who would basically land Titanic on the back of it), and you’ve got yourself a bona fide ‘90s classic.
All that said, the best things about Heavenly Creatures come not from reality but from Jackson’s imagination. It's fascinating to look back on some of the movie’s dreamiest sequences now and see the building blocks of what the director would later achieve in Middle-earth. In other words: genuine movie magic.
