Heavenly Creatures is far and away his "best" movie, for better or worse. The first three were a hell of a lot of fun, though. He did horror comedy at least as well as Sam Raimi did. Braindead is legitimately funnier than Evil Dead 2 is, and is also more extreme and uncomfortable in terms of what is actually being depicted on screen, when that was explicitly what Raimi was going for at the same time. It's just a lot more comfortable about being explicitly and apologetically silly. Silly beer and popcorn flicks like that, and even "video nasties" per se., certainly do deserve a lot more respect in my opinion. That's how Cronenberg got started. It's how Polanski got started, too. With Heavenly Creatures it genuinely looked to me like Jackson was on that kind of path. Jackson make some choices starting with Lord of the Rings (or maybe with The Frighteners?) that led him to a less historic place in cinema history than that, though. I genuinely think that's OK. He's made, what, seven genuinely good movies (including both the LOTR films and his recent doco)? People will still be watching his movies in 20 years, even if not in a hundred. I had a better vision for where he was going to end up in 1994, but it's very hard to argue that the man has not done himself proud with the body of work he has laid down.