The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

1/2 (out of 4)

I must admit that I was seven years old when this movie came out. I was a fan of the cards and I remember begging my mother to take me to see this on opening day, which she did. A couple of my friends went along and I still remember the sold out crowd of pre-teens laughing and having a blast with the film. I believe I watched it a couple more times when it first hit VHS but I haven't seen it since....until this latest viewing.

What did I think of the film twenty-two years after being a kid who loved it? Well, it was the pits. It really shocked me to re-watch something I found entertaining as a kid and I know that saying that many kids never grow up but thankfully I did. Now I'm not going to sit here and put this film down for being disgusting, vile or featuring "ugly" jokes because nothing here offended me today. What I will put down is the entire screenplay, which really makes one scratch their head because the story is so bad that you can't help but wonder if any real attempt was made to come up with something good or if this was just thrown together to make some quick cash.

The story pretty much as the Garbage Pail Kids coming to the aid of a weak boy (Mackenzie Astin) who might just be getting taken advantage of by a girl (Katie Barberi) he has a crush on. I think the biggest problem with the screenplay is that it tries to tell too much story in regards to the GPK and this wasn't needed. The cards told us all we needed to know so the film should have just stood back and delivered the goods that the cards did.

Valorie Vomit, Ali Gator, Greaser Greg, Nat Nerd, Windy Winston, Messy Tessie and Foul Phil are the kids here and most of them never really get to dig into their "tricks" from the cards. Valorie Vomit, for one example, only does her thing once at the end of the movie. Now, a lot of parents back in the day would have said that's a good thing but every generation has its thing that parents object to and this was one from the 80s.

The performances are all pretty brutal with Astin not delivering anything and Barbieri delivering a really, really bad performance. You do have the costumes by John Carl Buechler who previously did the film TROLL and would later do Friday THE 13TH PART VII. While watching this horrid movie I couldn't help but smile at thinking back at some of the cards and passing them around class in the school. It's a real shame that this film didn't do anyone any good but I can't help but wish that a real R-rated remake would come along and really do things right.

Fmovies: Everyone involved in the making of this movie, from the coke-vacuuming, muckraking scum who financed it to the gaffer's newest apprentice, is going directly to hell.

This isn't just a bad movie. It's a psychotic, surreal journey into the realm of the profoundly grotesque. The Garbage Pail Kids themselves are terrible in their deformity, with exaggerated facial features and apparent elephantitis of the cranium making them hurtful to witness. Poorly-done animatronics make them all appear as if their facial muscles have been injected with lidocaine. They have a collective IQ of approximately 58.

It's not pleasant to watch. It's not funny, it's not kitschy, it's not camp. The dialogue is pat and smarmy, the characters stupid and forgettable, and the whole slimy mess reeks of greedy bastards trying to make a fistful of money on the flavor of the week. TGPKM is another example of how depressingly low the common denominator really is...and this was BEFORE the reality TV craze.

It hurts.

As a lover of movies, I sat down to see The Garbage Pail Kids Movie after hearing from so many people how bad it was. Sometimes when I see "bad" movies, they are not so bad if mediocre,or movies that are so bad they're good, but there are other times when the movie that is supposed to be bad IS bad. This garbage belongs in the latter, it was so awful(in my opinion that is) that I didn't know whether to vomit or cry. I will give credit and say it is not quite the worst movie I have ever seen, but that isn't saying much.

Firstly, I do have to agree with other reviewers that this is one of the poorly written kids movies out there. I know this movie is supposed to be bad and mindless trash, but the dialogue alone makes it not only bad, it makes it garbage. The dialogue is mega lame and not quotable at all, and I didn't laugh once. The humour was also very grotesque, I know the cards are quite grotesque, and movies like Freddy Got Fingered had grotesque and very unsubtle humour, but The Garbage Pail Kids Movie takes the whole meaning of the word "grotesque" to a whole new level and in a bad way. Plus the pranks are very mean-spirited, as is the knockabout violence.

Then there is the story. What was the story again? To me, it had those talentless hacks Friedberg and Seltzer written over it, it is one of the most poorly constructed stories in a movie, with drawn out scenes, plodding pace you name it. Next, the production values, am I the only person who thought they were appalling? The sets were poor, the lighting was dim, the camera work was like direct to video quality, the special effects were laughable and the costumes were horrible. Don't get me wrong, I like 1980s fashion, it is funky and cool, but the costumes here made me want to gouge my eyes out.

Even the soundtrack was awful. Generic, lifeless and uninspired, even worse than the music in Disaster Movie, which sounded like it had been made up on the spot at last minute. Not to mention it is the epitome of cheesiness. And the acting was atrocious. Anthony Newley was wasted as Captain Manzini, and MacKenzie Astin is a bland and inept child protagonist. Juice and Tangerine are underdeveloped and clichéd, and Ali Gator, Greaser Greg and Nat Nerd are unlikeable and I think ugly characters with voices that have haunted me in my sleep since seeing the movie last night. And they wasted Jim Cummings completely here, the immortal voice actor who gave us Darkwing Duck, Dr RobotNik and Don Karnage has sounds utterly embarrassed here, it makes me want to cry.

Overall, absolutely awful. When I finished watching it, yes I watched the whole thing, I was like what was that? 1/10(and that is being kind, I could tell even from the title it wasn't going to be good). Bethany Cox

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie fmovies. This movie came on at around 6 AM on Cinemax this morning, and out of curiosity aroused from the fact that they would make a movie based on that utterly ridiculous card game, me and my friend sat down and decided to watch it. And almost instantly we were perplexed. Absolutely flabbergasted by the fact that a movie studio would go ahead and produce this movie. It is by far one of the most poorly written movies I have ever seen. The bizarre plot never seems to come together and make sense. The gags run utterly flat and actually tend to leave you with a sick feeling in your stomach. Not to mention one of the poorest makeup jobs in film history. As for the acting, one word can describe it: atrocious. The actors, with the exception only in some cases for Anthony Newley, seem to be doing nothing more than shouting their lines through the almost forced emotion, which comes over as horridly flat and unbelievable. If you're actually interested in this movie, I would go ahead and recommend it. A spectacle such as this film is something you rarely come upon.

This movie is terrible!! One of the fascinating things about the cast is that the two main characters 'Dodger' and 'Tangerine' happen to look at least 8yrs apart, but are in fact only 12mths apart.

The 'Garbage Pail Kids' themselves have awful costumes that are very poorly designed and really badly operated. The puppeteers need to be shot!!

I decided to find this movie and watch it because I hadn't seen it since it first come out, and I was sure I enjoyed it as a kid- What was wrong with me!!!

Save yourself a disappointing hour and a half....

Without question the worst movie I've ever seen, and not even in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. It's ninety minutes of sheer torture, starring a hideous cast of makeup nightmares; indisputable evidence of the lengths a commercial property can stretch for the almighty dollar. Like most children of the eighties, I had a healthy collection of GPK stickers in my closet growing up. The gross-out humor and macabre illustrations were a big selling point, but beneath all that was a creative core and a wild amount of versatility. Every card was completely different. The one-note comedy of their film translation, though, is like opening a pack filled with duplicates. I counted six jokes with a visual punchline of "and then he peed his pants." That's not an exaggeration, and it's not the only example of the flick's careless comedic redundancy. Combine that with an appalling song and dance number (seriously), a horribly out-of-place romantic subplot (starring a pre-pubescent boy and a girl well into her twenties, no less) and a gang of foils cut clumsily from recycled cardboard. It's genuinely amazing this ever saw the light of day.