The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Argh. This movie is atrocious, every little bit as much as I was led to believe it was. To start off, I consider Nostalgia Critic’s scathing review of this flick as mandatory viewing:

Honestly, there isn’t much to add to that. “Garbage Pail Kids” is so loosely structured and plotted that there isn’t much to talk about. I will get to review of this film as well soon, but there are a lot of similarities between this and “Blubberella”: they both rely on tired, crass humor, and they both depend far too heavily on improvisation for content. You will notice in clips that the Garbage Pail Kids are constantly just making noise in the background, or filling up their scenes with rambling noise. There is just no way that was all scripted: I can almost guarantee that the voice actors were told to just riff away in the recording booth, and the result is a jumbled mess. Which brings us to the voice acting…

To call the voice acting “bad” is beyond generous. It is a chorus of screeching, wailing, cackling cacophony. To be fair though, I imagine that the voice actors were doing exactly what they were told to do. The Garbage Pail Kids are supposed to be repulsive, which would justify them sounding so horrible. That said, it doesn’t make it any easier to listen to, and the fact that they are usually all making noises at once throughout their scenes makes the experience all the worse. The in-person actors are just genuinely bad in this movie, most notably the child protagonist and the band of (much older) bullies who torment him.

I would be remiss to not mention the nightmarish puppets in this movie. Just take a good look at these:

I think that is all I have to note about the horrific work on that front.

Last but not least, I have a serious issue with the message of this movie. It claims to be a “beauty is what is on the inside” tale, with the GPKs as an example of good people (creatures? aliens?) who look strange/ugly. The writing has all of the subtlety to take a subplot to break people out of the “State Home for the Ugly”, where apparently all of the greatest minds in the world are held because of physical imperfections. Back to the titular kids, though: there is nothing to indicate that they are, in fact, beautiful on the inside. One of them threatens to eat the child protagonist on more than one occasion, and another one brandishes a knife more than once with minimal provocation. They are just horrible beings, outside and inside.

I would never recommend this movie to anyone. The meandering plot structure would make the movie boring even if all other elements were on target. As it is, there is nothing on par about this movie: everything is mediocre to abysmal. I am genuinely shocked that this is no longer in the IMDb Bottom 100, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it show up back on the list before long. In short, this movie is an assault on the senses in every possible way, as if it were an art project manufactured with the intention to cause cinematic displeasure.