#77 The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (Wes)

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Back in the late 80s, the world was awash with the trading card sensation that was The Garbage Pail Kids. Each card had a cartoon picture of a kid on it, with their own deformity or abnormality and a humourous name to match the picture. My personal favourites were Dead Ted (because of the awesome zombie art), Adam Bomb (a boy with a mushroom cloud coming from his head) and the brilliantly named Alice Island (wordplay on Ellis Island and The Statue of Liberty). If you find out out whether you share a name with one, then check out the full list here http://wgpkr.com/GPK/FindYourName/.These cards were reviled by adults (they were even banned in a lot of schools), and loved by kids. So much so that somebody decided that making a movie out of pun-based trading cards was a good idea.

Captain Manzini (Anthony Newley) is a magician who owns a antiques shop. Somehow he ended up with a garbage can (or rubbish bin for my British readers) in his shop, which he tells his young shop assistant, Dodger (Mackenzie Astin), not to ever touch. When Dodger tries to get the girl he fancies, Tangerine (Kate Barberi), to buy something, he gets chased around the shop by her boyfriend, Juice (Ron MacLachlan) and his gang of bullies. During the ensuing chaos, the garbage can gets knocked on the floor and a green slime leaks out, which soon turns into seven strange children (Ali Gator, Windy Winston, Messy Tessie, Foul Phil, Valerie Vomit, Greaser Greg and Nat Nerd). The Garbage Pail Kids rescue Dodger from the sewer, where the bullies have left him, and befriend him. They then proceed to help him try to get the girl, whilst Captain Manzini tries to find the right spell to put them back in the garbage can.

As said before the movie was based on the Garbage Pail Kids, which were supposed to be gross and mildly offensive, so I expected this movie might well be the same. Unfortunately I was wrong. The only thing gross and mildly offensive about this movie is that somebody felt fit to make it.

This is a movie with a message though. The Garbage Pail Kids are told to stay away from “normies”. This is the movies message to the viewers; don’t judge people on their appearances alone (a nice reaction to the vanity of the 80s), but to judge them on their actions instead. The beautiful people turn out to be the most horrible and self centred, where the Garbage Pail Kids help out the hero and show themselves to be nice people inside. It’s like Todd Browning’s Freaks, but for kids.

  

To hammer this message home further, there’s a part of the movie where the Kids help to make Tangerine some clothes for a fashion show (including what every kids film needs: A sewing montage!) and to stop them from spoiling it Juice and the rest of the bullies kidnap the Kids and take them to the State Home for the Ugly. This is where Captain Manzini was worried that all their other friends had been taken to, but he’d never had time to search for it. However when they do go to try to find it, they stumble across it immediately (well they a van driven by men who capture ugly people in a butterfly net and then follow that). Which strikes me as being incredibly lazy on Captain Manzini’s part, as it seems that he only ever had to open the yellow pages to actually find it.

The Garbage Pail Kids themselves are rubbery monstrosities and not in a good way. They look as rubbery as the shark in Jaws: The Revenge, and only have the fact that there were dwarves acting inside the costumes saving them from being amongst the worst puppets to ever grace the silver screen. The animatronics that control their facial expressions seem to be culled from Halloween props bought from a supermarket, but at least that gives them the full emotional range of Kristen Stewart.

They really missed a great opportunity with these “Kids”, although they do have their funny moments. The expected fart, snot and vomit gags are there (along with some bad breath, pants wetting and bizarrely, toe eating), but they all just fall flat. Nat Nerd wets himself at any opportunity he gets (because all nerds spent their time wetting themselves before they took over the planet, right?), whilst Valerie Vomit actually only lives up to her name once. I think there was only one time that one of the fart gags made me laugh (Windy Winston knocks out a barman in a bar fight with his Boston cheer), and that’s a rare thing for me (Mystery Men, Blazing Saddles and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, amongst others, all had me in stitches with their fart gags).

The acting in this movie doesn’t fare much better. Ron MacLachlan and the rest of the bullies seem to have come straight out of Michael Caine’s acting school, and seem to think that shouting their lines is appropriate at all times, as do the actors voicing the Kids. The one actor whose performance I enjoyed was Anthony Newley. He does the best that he can with such a poor script and manages to come across quite likeable as an eccentric English shopkeeper.

So many great movies from the 80s had brilliant soundtracks, but there were also some that I hate with a fiery passion, Dirty Dancing being chief amongst these. So it was no surprise when I learned that these movies have somebody in common. Michael Lloyd wrote/produced songs for both (also for Ballistics Ecks vs Sever, so that’s the second time his work has appeared on this list).

Where a great score or soundtrack can really enhance a movie, watching something that has the sort of constant bad synth music that so many of the movies made in the 80s had can really distract you. Michael Lloyd seems to have been under the impression that he could do as good a job as Harold Faltermeyer. He was sorely mistaken in this and unfortunately made a soundtrack that’s more Revenge of the Nerds than Fletch. 

Oh but I’ve saved the worst ‘til last. There’s a song in the middle of the movie for no real reason. Sounding like it could fit into an episode of Barney the Dinosaur, The Garbage Pail Kids sing about how “we can anything by working with each other”, whilst they make the clothes to help out Dodger. Does anybody actually like these nauseatingly bad songs ever? It’s like there’s somebody in Hollywood that writes these songs about friendship and co-operation that seems to have a lot of dirt on everyone who makes a kids movie and forces one of them into as many films as they can. Randy Newman, I’m looking at you. It’s so bad that I’m surprised that Valerie Vomit didn’t spend the entire song puking over the rest of the Kids.

Like Mac and Me, I vaguely remember watching this as a kid and quite liking it. But I’ve now learnt that young Wes wasn’t that great a judge when it came to movies I went into this with trepidation. Was I wrong to do that? Well, yes and no. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it was strangely entertaining in parts, but to say it’s anything other than complete rubbish would be lying. A curious movie that should have stayed in the 80s along with other curiosities, like shell suits and Madonna.