Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) | Review - From Trading Cards To Box Office Poison

Garbage Pail Kids was both a box office  bomb and whipping boy for film critics. It was based on the insanely popular chewing  gum trading cards and stickers that adorned my school's lockers and toilet cubicles. Garbage Pail Kids was conceived as being a spoof of Cabbage Patch Dolls. A toy line that  caused riots in the run up to Christmas in 1983. The sometimes violent, often disturbing and  plain gross lead to them being banned from school playgrounds all over the world. Time has been  kind to

them and the art style is just fantastic. Drawing influence from old horror films,  celebrities, pop culture and bodily functions. The series was revived in 2003 tapping into our  universal obsession of everything retro 80s. The film is about Dodger, a young teenager who  works in Manzinis antique shop. He never goes to school and seemingly doesn't have any parents.  Dodger gets regular beatdowns for inexplicable reasons by much older kids, I say kids, grown  ass men and women. After a fight in

Manzini's the garbage pail kids get awakened - Gremlins style.  Dodger tries to date older fashion obsessed, Tangerine. He tries to win her over with the  garbage pail kid's custom fashion designs, that he passes off as his own. What  a sneaky little bastard. The bullies are of course after his ass and rat on the  garbage pail kids leading to their arrest. The film starts off promisingly with a  surprisingly well done trading card intro. The garbage pail kids maintain a fittingly,  cartoonishly

cute, but grotesque look. We've also got Anthony Newley who is fantastic as  Manzini. With a lot of these kids films the older characters can look a bit like lecherous  dirty old men. Characters like Mr Miyagi, Doc Brown and Willy Wonka get the balance  right of eccentricity and fatherly sage. Captain Manzini is no exception; with old school  manners and the childlike preoccupation of magic. That's were the good points end. The bullies  look a bit cheesy in an 80's way, maybe at the time they w

ould be menacing to younger viewers,  but now look like extras from a bad Troma film. The bullying acts are also surprisingly mean for  a kids film. Compared to Home Alone with the Wet Bandits being ridiculous, but also believable  enough to be ruthless criminals. GPK doesn't get the balance right as the bullies have none  of the charm or humour of Harry and Marv. Another problem is the repetition of jokes  that aren't good enough in the first place. Windy Winston never plays his trumpet which 

would have been a hoot for anyone under the age of 46. Instead we get comedy fart noises  and that's it. Nat Nerd who constantly pees his pants had potential for comedy. Then we have  snot and vomit jokes which just don't work. Kids love gross out humour but it has none of the  wit of the 'Captain Underpants' books or Doc Croc in 'Round the Bend'. What should have  been a vulgar, anarchic experience is a dry, by the numbers largely family friendly  film. The worst thing about it is Gremlins, Leg

end and Ghostbusters were all out before this  one and are love letters to the horror films and b-movies the directors and writers grew up on. Garbage Pail Kids is 80s nostalgia personified from the frankly laughable 80s fashions, the  animatronic effects to the dodgy synth pop soundtrack. It 's nowhere near one of the worst  films of all time or even one of the worst kids films, but it's films like this that show us  just how difficult it is to craft a kid's film and just how rare great family

friendly films  like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Matinee and the less kid friendly monster squad are. Watch  those instead of this oddball curiosity.