“FREAKS ONLY” is a series where I churn through gross movies for total weirdos. Welcome to the party.

Rating: 🤮

On my first attempt watching The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, I turned it off about an hour in to meet a dude downtown. By the time we made it to his hotel, I realized he had a huge arm tat of Tony the Tiger smoking a bowl. Even then, I figured I was making the better choice, and finally finishing The Garbage Pail Kids Movie only confirms that suspicion. This film is so utterly rancid that sitting through it makes me desperately wish I was doing anything, literally anything else, not to mention fucking around with a guy rocking cereal mascot ink.

Now, “The Garbage Pail Kids Movie sucks” is not a particularly hot take. The film maintains an enviable 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, standing small alongside hall-of-fame turds such as Mac and Me and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. I don't love trodding our culture’s well-worn path of shooting shitty fish in the bad media barrel, but a further examination feels warranted. This series is about movies for freaks, and for all its mainstream notoriety, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie remains unequivocally for freaks. The film’s target audience is not kids, or weird ironic adults, but some enclave of subhuman silver screen sickos that I hope to never meet. I can only assume contemporary fans were thrilled when Garbage Pail Kids’ companion piece, Gummo, finally dropped ten years later.

Anyway, I'm fairly positive you already know about The Garbage Pail Kids. The trading card series remains a cultural touchstone for weird kids, and punny creeps such as “Adam Bomb” and “Shrunken Ed” are still gruesome enough to be pretty hilarious. Topps unleashed these little gremlins in 1985 to astounding success, then followed the money straight to a 1987 release of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. What they squeezed out of director/writer Rod Amateau (his last film!) is a baffling, half-baked hairball of psychosexual grotesqueries; a cavalcade of quease that fails as both a kid-meets-monster film and a gross-out comedy. To have watched it once is a burden; to have viewed it twice is leaping into the slimy, stinking abyss.

My first draft of this piece contained an eight paragraph, beat-by-beat assessment of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie’s plot, but it honestly sucked to read and I don’t care enough about this celluloid shitpile to make you choke that down. Essentially, there’s a 14-but-looks-11-year-old twerp named Dodger who wants to woo a 15-but-looks-25-year-old punk gal named Tangerine. Tangerine is an aspiring fashion designer, so Dodger ingratiates himself first by helping her sell clothes outside a nightclub, and then by designing his own clothes for her to sell. Ah, you ask, but how does this prepubescent deadbeat visualize and sew such cutting edge fashions? The answer is that he doesn’t, he just wheedles the Garbage Pail Kids into doing it for him, vogue wunderkinds that they are.

You see, Dodger works in the curio store of colonialist magician Captain Manzini, who acquired the titular garbage pail in his travels. Inside this “Pandora’s Box,” our eponymous Kids exist as green slime......but watch out! The lid comes off, and the Kids escape after a scuffle between Dodger and Tangerine’s boyfriend, Juice. The Kids rescue Dodger, and we meet our full cast of semi-animatronic abominations, most of whom still visit me on the back of my eyelids. There's farting Windy Winston, snotty Messy Tessie, death-breath baby-goblin Foul Phil, and Nat Nerd, who’s only contribution is pissing himself five times. There's also Valerie Vomit, who doesn't show off her talent until minute 89 of a 96 minute film. Another member is Greaser Greg, who talks in a bad New York accent and punctuates every sentence with “AYY!” He's one of two occasionally “legitimately” funny Kids, along with Ali Gator, an anthropomorphic alligator with a taste for flesh and a fetish for toes.

These hellions hobble, screech, and stink their way through The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, becoming Dodger’s friends while sewing clothes and singing (yes!) about the joys of labor. The ghouls venture out a couple times: they steal equipment, go to the movies, and get captured by the “State Home For The Ugly” for all of six minutes before escaping. However, they largely remain in Manzini’s basement, caught in a push-pull with Dodger over whether he's exploiting them (he is) for his own gain. The plot shuffles and stumbles until it culminates at a department store fashion show, where Tangerine betrays Dodger and steals the Kids’ clothing designs as her own. Alas! The Kids arrive, exact their revenge, and then escape into the night before Manzini can put them back in the pail. That's the end of the movie, dangling an ostensible cliffhanger like a booger begging to be wiped. No thanks.

The plot and narrative choices of The Garbage Pail Kids are bizarre, but they aren't what elevate this film into true blue fuckfreak territory. No, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie exudes a fog of sexual malaise rancid enough to kill small animals, and I'm not just saying that as a weirdo. The rotten, fucky id of this film is undeniable and pervasive; a sickly sweet stench that won't disappear for days after you've scrubbed the trash can and done the dishes. The film points a gun at your head every moment Dodger and Tangerine share the screen, mostly because they’re both creeps who look twelve years apart. Their tryst begins when Dodger discreetly sniffs her hair, and it doesn’t get better from there. The whole affair is slimy and horrendous, especially when the puppy love escalates into full seduction, with Tangerine cooing “baby” at Dodger every possible opportunity. I feel like I need a shower, and not because of all the snot.

If that wasn't enough for you, oh yes! The Kids are gonna get their rocks off too! Much like Funny Games, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie implicates viewers in the grotesqueries which unfold onscreen. For example, how do you feel when Valerie Vomit asks Dodger to “suck face?” What emotions run through your brain when Greaser Greg is harassing women at the movie theater, or “playing doctor” with Messy Tessie? Is this gross enough for you? Is this what you wanted to see? I say no. I say, no, thank you, I really didn't need to think about the Garbage Pail Kids having hormones, nor do I need to consider that maybe the Kids are actually weird, nightmarish Garbage Pail Adults. Forcing me to ponder whether or not the Garbage Pail Kids are creatures that fuck is so unspeakably cursed that it causes me legitimate psychic damage. Absolutely foul.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is indeed deeply disgusting, but in a more distressing sense than I believe anyone intended. Instead of a chaotic cartoon romp, we get something which is severely uncanny by virtue of its realism. Garbage Pail Kids is unable to conceive of a world where being foul is fun, unable to grasp the subversion which makes filth entertaining, and thus exists as a stodgy parade of dismal sludge where we must bear witness to the grand grotesque joke instead of being in on it. There are no laughs, only revulsion and pity. Watching the gruesome Kids go about their business is like experiencing the Eraserhead’s baby's first day at preschool, or observing a playground half a mile from Chernobyl. It would be a mercy to wipe their doughy forms and grimy voices from this earth.

I want this movie out of my life. Being gross is one thing, but Garbage Pail Kids is completely devoid of imagination. The narrative proves fruitless, which renders the transgressions on display that much more unbearable. If you’re of a particular mind, you’ll actually have fun with this rotten apple, but I don’t think I can do it. I’ll admit though, my second viewing elevated the film from “unwatchable” to “intolerable,” and there’s a smattering of funny moments. The best is when Ali Gator goes cruising for toes at a seedy bar, the camera tracking across a selection of feet as he groans and sweats over which piggies to bite. He finds his victim and exclaims “it’s toe time!” before chomping down. The Kids refer to the world at large as “normies,” a bit which has aged exceptionally well. Finally, there’s an early fight between Juice and Dodger, an absurd scuffle that concludes with an absolutely hysterical shot of Dodger knocked out in a puddle of raw sewage.

Despite The Garbage Pail Kids Movie’s myriad nightmares, that dweeby 14-year-old lying unconscious as liquid excrement spews on him from above is the image I’ll carry with me. It’s a moment so perfect it couldn’t have possibly been intended; a single genuine artistic triumph in an ocean of fetid tedium. The litany of darkness, disquiet, and fear on parade in The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is the closest modern media has ever come to emulating Bosch, Bruegel, or Goya, and this shit-splattered child is the film’s crowning triumph. Positively harrowing. I can’t imagine ever revisiting this movie, but you never know. Sometimes the darkest works yield the most reward.

FREAKS ONLY: The Fetid Hell of THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE