The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

I know this is going to sound like sanction for the people responsible for this movie, but The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is something so seamy, so gross and so repellent that it made me rethink my chosen profession.  I’m not being glib. often a movie will come along that makes me question whether the movies have broken faith with me, that their craft have been placed in the hands of people who don’t know (or don’t care) what movies are suppose to be about.

The focus here is to make money off of a popular brand name.  I know a little about The Garbage Pail Kids, at least enough to know that I wanted nothing to do with them.  They were a series of Topps trading cards that parodied The Cabbage Patch Kids by rending their cloying cuteness into a series of characters with names and traits, like Valerie Vomit, Bad Breath Seth and Guillo-Tina.  They were gross, which I guess is the point, but they were also creepy and unsettling.

So, too, is there movie, which is live-action, making the characters all the more unsettling.  The GBK are played by little people in oversized suits with mouths that barely move.  Their flesh looks like modeling clay and their voices sound like they are being piped in from the next room.  And somewhere in the middle is the story of a ten-year-old kid named Dodger who is constantly harassed by a pack of bullies who are in their mid-20s making the film’s value system even more of a question mark.

I know I sound like I am taking this too seriously but, really, the movie is an unsettling experience.  It’s ugly, creepy and seems to run the same jokes on and on and on.  That fact that this trash is made for kids makes it even more unsettling, turning their young minds toward a manure field of consumerist magnetism that gives them less than nothing.