The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

The overwhelmingly popular, incredibly gross Cabbage Patch Kids rip-off trading cards by the Topps corporation from the '80s first spawned this live-action film and then an animated television series which was boycotted by parents groups and ultimately never aired in the USA (though the latter was tame, kinda charming in a cheesy '80s way, and it was eventually issued on DVD).

THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE made a briefer-than-brief appearance in cinemas in the USA in 1987, then wound up dumped on VHS the following year with absolutely no fanfare -- and surprisingly, it made its way to DVD a few years ago. The story revolves around young Dodger (Mac Astin, "The Facts of Life"), who's in love with big-haired fashion designer Tangerine (Katie Barberi, NOT QUITE HUMAN II), but she's disinterested and her bully boyfriend Juice (Ron MacLachlan) is standing in the way. At wizard Cap'n Manzini's (actor/writer Anthony Newly, co-writer of the songs in WILLIE WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY) curio shop where Dodger works, a garbage pail is accidentally dropped, releasing the handful of Garbage Pail Kids who've been imprisoned inside. The "kids" decide to help Dodger win Tangerine's affections but they ultimately they wind up captured and held at The State Home for the Ugly... where other Garbage Pail Kids were subjected to a trash compactor. The movie sounds just as bizarre as it is!

According to a vintage article in the L.A. Times, nobody wanted to talk about The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. The p.r. guy at the Topps trading card co. was so reluctant to discuss it that he wouldn't give his name. The film's distributor, Atlantic Releasing, didn't want to answer their phones. Writer/director Rodney Amateau was out of the country when the film was released. The film debuted on a scant 374 screens across the nation. It was more than 20 years later that I discovered a soundtrack was released, so I surmise Curb Records were just as reluctant to discuss the film as anyone (and considering how rare the album is, it doubtlessly got an extremely small pressing). I have to wonder if it was the firestorm of controversy that the trading cards were under at the time which led to this lack of promotion or if everyone realized they had a real turkey on their hands. Could go either way.

The script is pretty terrible, the effects are horrendous, the puppets' mouths never match their dialog (matter of fact, their mouths don't even move half of the time), the humor generally falls flat and the story's pretty trite. For a while, it was ranked in the bottom 100 on the Internet Movie Database, but it seems to have made its way off the list (for the moment). The film is low-brow and never once pretends that it isn't, which lends a weird sort of charm to the production. Bad, absolutely.... but it falls into that intentionally so-bad-it's-good category.

It's worth mentioning that there's some ties to the previous year's TROLL -- Phil Fondacaro gets top billing here as Greaser Greg, a painting from TROLL is prominently displayed next to the staircase in Cap'n Manzini's basement (and some of Eunice's treasures can probably be seen in the shop), and I presume that the puppets were probably from the same team. Of course, the puppets in TROLL didn't really talk, aside from during the weird musical sequence, so it didn't matter that they couldn't annunciate -- but the bad mouth movements verge on painful to watch at times in GARBAGE PAIL KIDS.