Garbage Pail Kids

You people are insane and m' toissing the point.

When I was a teenager I used to take my friends out to the worst movie I could find on my birthday. I subjected them to everything from 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' to 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'

My piece dah rezistence was 'The Garbage Pail Kids Movie'.

This movie is so bad, it is almost impossible to find.

It makes 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 look like Citizen Kane'.

Please release this on DVD. In a universe where it's easier for me to buy 'Erin Brokovich' than 'The Garbage Pail Kids Movie' there is no god.

This movie came on at around 6 AM on Cinemax this morning, and out of curiosity aroused from the fact that they would make a movie based on that utterly ridiculous card game, me and my friend sat down and decided to watch it. And almost instantly we were perplexed. Absolutely flabbergasted by the fact that a movie studio would go ahead and produce this movie. It is by far one of the most poorly written movies I have ever seen. The bizarre plot never seems to come together and make sense. The gags run utterly flat and actually tend to leave you with a sick feeling in your stomach. Not to mention one of the poorest makeup jobs in film history. As for the acting, one word can describe it: atrocious. The actors, with the exception only in some cases for Anthony Newley, seem to be doing nothing more than shouting their lines through the almost forced emotion, which comes over as horridly flat and unbelievable. If you're actually interested in this movie, I would go ahead and recommend it. A spectacle such as this film is something you rarely come upon.

If you were a boy growing up in the 1980s, you likely collected the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. I was obsessed with them, and I even got to see this movie when it was released. I didn't remember a thing about it, but I was aware that it now has a reputation as one of the worst movies ever made. And, boy howdy, does it deserve it! This thing is simply dreadful. It brings to life seven of the trading card characters in all their disgusting glory, making them impossibly hideous dwarfs with hydrocephalic domes. Ushering them into the world is Sean Astin's younger brother Mackenzie, who uses their skills at clothing design (?!) to impress an older girl (Katie Barberi, quite attractive). She uses his affection to pass the clothes off as her designs. The film's attempts at humor are predictably juvenile, but I doubt I found them even close to funny, even as an 8 year-old. The movie isn't boring, but it's mind-numbingly awful. A must-see for anyone who likes bad movies, though, be warned, this is far from being so bad it's good. It's so bad it's soul-crushing!

Without question the worst movie I've ever seen, and not even in a "so bad it's good" sense. It's ninety minutes of sheer torture, starring a hideous cast of makeup nightmares; indisputable evidence of the lengths a commercial property can stretch for the almighty dollar. Like most children of the eighties, I had a healthy collection of GPK stickers in my closet growing up. The gross-out humor and macabre illustrations were a big selling point, but beneath all that was a creative core and a wild amount of versatility. Every card was completely different. The one-note comedy of their film translation, though, is like opening a pack filled with duplicates. I counted six jokes with a visual punchline of "and then he peed his pants." That's not an exaggeration, and it's not the only example of the flick's careless comedic redundancy. Combine that with an appalling song and dance number (seriously), a horribly out-of-place romantic subplot (starring a pre-pubescent boy and a girl well into her twenties, no less) and a gang of foils cut clumsily from recycled cardboard. It's genuinely amazing this ever saw the light of day.

I already knew this movie was legendarily bad, so I only have myself to blame for sitting down and watching it when it came on TV. To understand how this atrocity came to be, you have to understand what they were thinking when they were making it. Garbage Pail Kids was a trading card parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids that was basically a gross or ridiculous take on them. They were so popular that someone somewhere thought, "What if we took this shallow concept completely dependent on making fun of another property and turn it into a feature length film?" It's notable that the Cabbage Patch people never actually tried to go that far (or at least, never succeeded).

What we got was an ill-conceived dumpster fire that is an abject failure in every way conceivable. I could spend all day talking about how the story is nonsensical and aimless, how the suits/animatronics are creepy and nightmarish, etc. But that stuff's been covered a million times, so I'm going to focus on the real odious aspect, and that's the characters: a collection of paper thin, unmotivated tropes. Dodger is your typical bullied kid daring to look for bigger and better things. He's antagonized by a bunch of bullies for no reason other than for us to feel sorry for him (though if they bullied him because of his stupid name, I'd understand). Then there are the Garbage Pail Kids themselves, who are bizarrely portrayed as protagonists despite being repulsive physically and personality-wise. You can imagine the type of comedic depth you will encounter with characters like "Valerie Vomit" and "Windy Winston." When the characters aren't constantly farting and peeing on themselves, they're at each others' throats or even aggressively stepping to Dodger. I can only imagine the audience's reception to E.T. if he repeatedly threatened to shank Elliott if he didn't get to phone home. We're supposed to be rooting for these guys?

The most bizarre part of an already ridiculous movie happens when the bullies kidnap the kids and send them to the "State Home for the Ugly," where people deemed too ugly are executed. Wait, what? What is this twisted, alternate Earth where they kill off ugly people and why is it so out of place in what was beforehand (and after) a disgusting, cliché 80's mess? Lincoln and Gandhi are locked up here so I guess it's insultingly implying the Kids are unconventional in appearance but important for their contribution to society, some sort of misplaced Aesop about true beauty coming from within...despite the Kids being genuinely horrific on the inside. The kids are rescued (unfortunately) but their execution would have been a fitting end to this disaster. There's also a silly romance plot with a girl named Tangerine of all things, facilitated by the Kids' sudden ability to sew fashionable clothes for her fashion show.

So yeah, it's offensively bad. Don't make the same mistake I did and waste you time with it. There's nothing here for you but tears and fecal matter.