The shitty, fucking awful Garbage Pail Kids movie becomes interesting only if you look at it as a film that is SUPPOSED to be bad.
And not in the Sharknado sense, where the makers are TRYING to make a bad movie because they’re playing directly to an audience who likes to feel superior to the movies that they see.
No, the way you watch The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is to imagine that some hungry screenwriters were saddled with the task of turning an edgy kids trading card fad into a movie aimed at the mass audience and they had no idea how to do that. Or maybe their interesting ideas were rejected by the execs.
So, they drove it into the ditch.
The schtick behind the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards was that they were all gross-outs. Zits, out-of-control bodily functions, obesity, deformities, mutilations and lots of dead kids. The characters had names like Bad Breath Seth (a kid with halitosis that kills plants and birds), Frozen Flo (a kid who froze to death), Mugged Marcus (a badly beaten kid) and Leaky Lindsay (a kid with a seriously runny nose). They were parodies of the mean nicknames that kids give to each other in school.
They were disgusting and stupid and some schools banned kids from bringing them back in the day, but if you want to pick a positive message out of them, you could say that they encouraged kids to have a sense of humor about themselves. Every common name had a card so almost everyone in your third grade class potentially had a Garbage Pail doppelganger (mine would have been Basin Jason, a kid on the toilet).
None of us are better than the other. We are ALL Garbage Pail Kids, me and you and all the pretty and popular kids. I can hang with that.
As for the movie, it embraces the gross-outs. Windy Winston farts about fifty-eight times. Nat Nerd pisses his pants every time there’s a lull in the story. Everybody get a little of Messy Tessie’s snot on them. Meanwhile, Valerie Vomit strangely only lets loose once.
However, this was the 80s so this movie is also obligated to get a little ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and Gizmo from Gremlins effect in there. The Garbage Pail Kids are grotesques, but they’re also sweet, aw shucks. When they befriend a lonely 14-year-old (Mackenzie Astin, brother to Sean Astin and son of John Astin and Patty Duke), they help him get over his problems, like any good weird alien should.
WHY do the Garbage Pail Kids become fashion designers in the middle of all of this?
Because, again, it was the 80s and, again, I think the makers just didn’t give a fuck.
But maybe that’s how you make a true Garbage Pail Kids movie. It’s not like the cards themselves were particularly visionary. They’d sometimes use the same artwork five times with different names attached. They didn’t care that much. It was just schtick.
The movie embodies that spirit, at least. It totally sucks. And it’s kind of proud of it.
Best gag: The weird, Fleischer cartoon-like State Home for the Ugly. That’s where the evil authorities want to send The Garbage Pail Kids. The funny part are the inmates in the background, that include a guy in a Santa suit classified as “Too Fat”, a clown marked as “Too Silly”, a guy with a cane for being “Too Crippled” and what looks like Gandhi for being “Too Bald”.
Weirdly, the director was Rod Amateau, a veteran television man whose body of work goes back to the kinescope days of the early 1950s and THIS was how he closed out his career in his mid-60s. Watch it in a double feature with Night Warning for weird 80s junk films made by old school directors of wholesome TV sitcoms.