The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

(On Cable TV, March 2020) In case you’re wondering: Yes, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is a real thing, and it’s repulsive. In case you’re wondering what it’s about, here’s a refresher: it’s a movie adaptation of a set of crudely humorous trading cards that satirized the syrupy-sweet Cabbage Patch Kids. I’m old enough to remember the furor around the cards when they were released in the mid-1980s, and while the negative reaction to the cards was overblown (there’s nothing in the cards that wasn’t done earlier by MAD Magazine, Edward Gorey or EC Comics), the aghast reaction to the movie adaptation is entirely justified. Literalizing the grotesque drawings and studied weirdness of the cards into live action leads us straight into the uncanny valley—using short-stature actors under plastic makeup to play the Kids is immediately heave-inducing, and the film doubles down repeatedly on its original sin through crude dumb jokes, amateurish filmmaking, perplexing staging, atrocious dialogue and whatever else can go wrong in a movie. As if that wasn’t enough, the film even has the audacity to push a message about beauty… that’s thoroughly muddled by everything the film does. The only question you’ll be asking is “whyyyyyy?“ While The Garbage Pail Kids Movie has acquired some notoriety as a cult movie in the past few decades, anyone even remotely tempted to watch it should be warned that it’s going to play as an endurance contest.