Worst Films » The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
It doesn’t really feel right to write about this film. I’ve been struggling to come up with a way to encapsulate this film in one sentence, and the best I can come up with is this: when the world finally ends, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie will at least make our horrific fate seem deserved. That humanity managed to put out such an abomination as this movie warrants nothing less than our total extinction.
Released in 1987 (and oh God, you can tell), The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was an attempt to capitalise on the relative success of the Garbage Pail Kids trading card series, in turn a crude and crass parody of the decidedly cuter Cabbage Patch Dolls. It may be the worst adaptation ever imagined by anyone, ever. Aside from the countless faults this film throws in your face (and I’ll get to them), its chief problem is how unnerving they look. Rather than rely on animation or animatronics, they instead relied on – wait for it – dwarves in suits. I wish I was kidding. They got a bunch of dwarves, made them wear huge, leering, completely static heads, and figured that would work. They produced the stuff of nightmares. I’m scared to sleep, now, and I’m 20 years old. Think about what this did to kids.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg – everything about this film ranges from bad to the filmic equivalent of a man in a bare room screaming in anguish until the end of time. First up, it’s dark. One of the Kids sports a flick knife, and the other one suffers from incontinence (I say suffers; he’s proud of it). The protagonist gets the shit beaten out of him more than once, and there’s a particularly harrowing scene where his attackers leave him to drown in raw sewage. No-one in the film acts, apart from Anthony Newley as Captain Manzini, who I’d call a saving grace but doesn’t come even close.
The film has two plots. One involves Dodger, the protagonist (an awful Marty McFly, right down to the haircut), trying to win the affections of Tangerine (a girl), by forcing the aforementioned Kids to design clothes for her fashion collection. Tangerine is the girlfriend of Juice, a total misogynist dickhead who makes Dodger’s pitiful attempts that much harder. If the film was just this, I think I could deal with it. It’d be really boring, but I wouldn’t have nightmares.
The other plot involves the abduction of the Kids by Juice’s gang and their confinement to the State Home for the Ugly, a holding facility where ugly people are locked up by the government before execution. This is something that, yes, is generally acknowledged as a Bad Thing, but it isn’t treated with quite the horror it deserves, considering we’re talking about death row for unattractive children. I should add – this movie was marketed to kids. It’s intended for people about eight years younger than me.
That it’s a film for kids is worrying. There are a few scenes of horrific violence, a sequence where the Kids get ridiculously drunk, and the most sexualised portrayal of a child I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen Lolita). I’m all for tough love when it comes to kids – the adaptations of Roald Dahl’s work, Tim Burton’s abomination excluded, did this incredibly well – but this is just disturbing. Poorly executed and awfully acted too, of course, but above all – just wrong.
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I actually remember the Garbage Pail Kids – or at least I do now that this article has unearthed it from the dank cellar door in my mind behind which I’d locked it. Somehow as a child I ended up with a single one of the collectable cards, which, if I remember rightly, had the delightful special feature of a ‘scratch ‘n’ sniff’ refuse aroma. Even as a six-year old I found the whole thing unsettling and used to hide the card at the bottom of my toy box. For all I know, it’s still lurking there now.
I was 12 when the Garbage Pail Kids came out. Loved them, had quite a few of the cards and wasn’t scared in the slightest, although after reading your article I did look up some clips on the internet…