The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Dir: Rod Amateau

1987

**

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is regarded as one of the worst films of all time. It's true that it is awful but I think it can only really be regarded as one of the worst films of all time to mainstream viewers. I've seen much worse. I didn't see it in 1987 because I couldn't, angry parents lobbied against it with success, removing it from all the cinemas, so we sweet and innocent kids couldn't feed our curiosity or forge an opinion. It has since become a sort of cult classic. I think the parents have missed the point. Much like the adults who took their kids to see South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, they clearly didn't realize they'd been buying their sprogs wonderfully disgusting trading cards (and tooth-rotting bubble gum) for several years. Frustrating really how they funded our hobbies just to rip them away from us when the big movie came out. I loved The Garbage Pail Kids when I was a kid, I loved the grotesque imagery of rancid and deformed babies and the creative names they were given. Even at a young age, I totally understood that this was a clear protest against the popular toy at the time, The Cabbage Patch Kids. The Cabbage Patch Kids were chubby and cute and everything that was wrong with toys at the time. We little tearaways rejected the social norms like the six year old punks we were and rejoiced at the sight of Adam Bomb, Oozy Suzy, Barfin' Bart and Greaser Greg and the horrifically graphic illustrations. Of course we loved them, they were created by the great Art Spiegelman! They were everything a kid could want that any kid could have. They were a secret way of rebelling against your parents, your teachers and adults in general without them knowing. They were a hell of a lot more interesting than the usual football trading stickers. I can watch the film now with a cloud of nostalgia, not just for the characters but for the late 80s. They got it completely wrong of course, like they did with every other Toy/Game/Cartoon adaptation in the 1980s but there was always a certain charm about them. They were bad films but they were our bad films. Honestly, you could sell us 80s kids any old crap and get away with it but the charm of not quite getting it right always beats poor CGI, cheap effects and the acceptance of your Mum and Dad, every day of the week. One could also say it fits into the 'So bad it's good' category. They come to earth in a Garbage pail from Out of Space, one gets drunk, one farts in people’s faces, one sneezes over people while another vomits on them and one of them bites off strangers toes. Each Kid is a small person in a badly fitted rubber costume that faces a different direction to that of the person inside. They never blink and their mouths don't work, it's fascinatingly bad. That's why I enjoyed it. It is a genuinely fascinating film from a film making aspect, a franchise aspect and historically - in a way. When thoroughly analysing the history on cinema, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is fairly unique. Whether you can tell a lot about the industry or not at the time is up for discussion but if aliens landed today and watched it how would we explain it to them? Good or bad, fascinating is fascinating so if you're going to be bad, you'd better be amazing with it and I would argue that it is. It is a horrible film but I couldn't keep my eyes off it and I was entertained (or fascinated) throughout.