source: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

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....

I love this movie. That's right, go ahead and judge. But this movie will forever remind me of being seven years old watching with my big brother and laughing until I nearly wet myself. Oh, who am I kidding? That happened just the last time we watched it and I was at least 18. This movie is for any child of the 80's who is not looking for good acting, special effects, dialogue or plot. If you are that person and your copy of Cool As Ice has lost that old familiar spark, hunt down this movie (which, due to its sad slip into obscurity, is rather difficult) and turn your brain off for some swell 80's fun with demented Cabbage Patch Dolls that inexplicably come to life.

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.

I bought this from a guy on Ebay for like $20, It took 3 weeks before I actually got it. Now, I collected the cards when I was a kid & saw it before & tried 2 get it. If u r a Garbage Pail Kid card collector or fan of this, then this is a classic & that is what I call it. I know its cheesy but its funny in a chessy way. Its got its chey dialogue but who cares, I like this movie. If u want 2 see a cheesy movie, try 2 rent this even though it is very rare & hard 2 find-2 rent same with buy.

Folks, this movie just screams the 80s! Did you know that I am a huge 80s person myself? I like the music, the movies, everything! And what other movie does not represent that decade well enough but..."The Garbage Pail Kids Movie?" Have your family step into the time machine and go back to a time when everything is so memorable, so great, so friendly, so retro! Learn all the valuable lessons these old school children's movies give us! Remember the times when we played with monsters and green space aliens! Go back to the times when we combine really old with really new! "The Garbage Pail Kids Movie" does all of that! As the song goes, "You, too, can be a Garbage Pail Kid." (And that was nominated for a Razzie!)

Films can come from many inspirations and sources. There are novels, plays, true stories, comic-books, video games and...trading cards? The woefully mis-handled Mars Attacks was based on a brilliant trading card series and it was hardly high art. A lower-lever trading card such as the Garbage Pail Kids is hardly likely to make great cinema. If this sort of thing cannot appeal to you (I have broad tastes and I'm a bit too understanding of flawed films) then don't even bother watching. I wanted to rent this movie when I was a kid but my grandmother (who always evaluated the videos first) thought it looked quite inappropriate (I subsequently went for Rambo: First Blood Part II, which she thought was more fitting for a 7-year-old). Since it's one and only incarnation on video tape in the late-80s (theatrical prints promptly vanished) this film has been totally non-existent. Luckily (if you like this sort of thing) MGM bought the rights, found a dusty print and spruced it up to give us a brand new digital incarnation of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. With erm...garbage like this getting a DVD release I must ask where the hell is Bigfoot and Howard the Duck? Direcor Rodney Amateau (a rather fitting-sounding surname) could have made this an animated movie (eg Care Bears) but no, he actually had the audacity and nerve to attempt it in live action. Note how I said 'attempt' and not 'succeed'. The animatronics are just horrible. Where is Jim Henson when you need him. So bad is the puppetry that the kids cannot even close their mouths and no one even bothered to lip-sync the dialogue. They are also disgusting beyond reason (as one who is familiar with the trading cards would expect). But after while they tend to grow on you (like an ulcer) and if you switch your brain off you might find that the film is alright. There's nothing magical here. Even for a film packed with horrendously 80s fashion and production design there isn't even much nostalgic appeal. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is certainly nothing like The Dark Crystal or even Ewoks: Caravan of Courage. Hell, it's even many leagues beneath Masters of the Universe. But, if curiosity takes control of you and you simply MUST own the film then go ahead. Just remember what I said about switching your brain off. The DVD is in not bad-looking 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen (considering most prints were probably left abandoned in an old mine somewhere) with Dolby Mono sound. Extras are limited to a single trailer.

While trying to find a movie to watch at my local mega-chain video store I stumbled across Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie. It wasn't necessarily a title that I was interested in, but due to its nostalgic value, I thought my wife would enjoy it. I do remember the Garbage Pail Kids pretty well, although they were a bit "after my time". It's no secret that the Garbage Pail Kids were supposed to be a disgusting and weird parody of the ever-so-clean Cabbage Patch Kids. When I rented it, I thought maybe there'd be some kind of creative use of sick and twisted humor, since the trading cards always had such delightfully vile characters on them. Was I ever wrong… First, let me start with the characters themselves. They looked exactly like they did on the trading cards, which was actually "off putting" in its own way. The costumes were very detailed, but the animatronics were horrible to say the least. It made me wonder if the people who designed them had been fired from Chuck E. Cheese's design studio. Next, we have the "acting", but that's stretching it a bit; I've seen stronger scripts in 1970's *. One commenter stated that "It looked like they were just making it up as they went along", to which I second that, although none of the dialog was even that imaginative. I just loved how the so-called bully (Juice) would harass Dodger, portrayed so ineptly by Mackenzie Astin by calling him a "creep" and then throwing him down in the sewer, dumpster, etc. All the human roles were cookie-cutter stereotypes and had absolutely no depth or personality whatsoever. I realize that this movie was made for kids, but even in other kid-friendly movies I've been forced to watch, you generally have some feeling or care about what's going on, even if it's only surface feelings. Watching this movie was the equivalent of having you eyelids propped open with toothpicks and duct tape and having to sit through an ABC After School Special about teen mothers played frame-by-frame in slow-motion and starring Scott Baio. Two things I still can't get over were two locations used in the storyline: "TOUGHEST BAR IN THE WORLD" and the "STATE HOME FOR THE UGLY". I suppose the writers felt that their audiences were certified mentally challenged and that it's imperative that everything must be spelled out for them. Movies can be silly, satirical, humorous, weird and even stupid sometimes, but this movie lacks all but the last I one I mentioned on this list. Nostalgia has never been so appalling as Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie.

I'll admit, I couldn't finish this atrocity. I watched 10 minutes worth of clips and I wouldn't usually write a review of a movie I haven't seen 90% of, but the 10 minutes was enough to convince me that you will never find a worse movie. And I saw Troll 2. The humor is crude, there isn't anything funny about the things those kids do. The acting is so bad, even the laughs sound fake. But it wasn't any of that that really made me cringe, although they added to the cringe factor a lot, it was the puppetry and the kids in general. Oh. My. Goodness. They are so creepy! And on top of being creepy, they're gross? No thank you!! Bottom of the heap. As someone who usually likes to give even bad movies a shot, the fact that I couldn't sit through the clips is saying something. I'm also very generous in my reviews (I gave Troll 2 a 5/10 for goodness sake!) but there is no comparison, this movie is by far the worst thing in film history. This should be recalled and the actors should keep this off their resumes.

I certainly wouldn't say this movie is a classic, even having been one of the children that collected the disgusting gross-out Garbage Pail Kids cards. Now "cult-classic," that's another matter. The movie was not promoted at all and barely hit the theaters (it wasn't even at the theater a full week where I lived at the time), so it quickly found its way to video shelves. The majority of the public never knew anything about it. I saw it during it's initial release, and even as a 11 year-old kid, I was majorly disappointed. Astin, Newley, and the lovely Barberi did an incredible job with the weak script they were handed -- but the story was so bare, it seemed like they were making it up as they went along. The costumes for the kids themselves were innovatively designed, but they lacked any sort of depth past their freaky looks. So the movie drags on as an annoying string of one-liners and gross-outs. You never really care one way or another for the kids. If I was going to watch a movie like that, I'd rather stick with the somewhat amusing "Meet the Feebles." No, "Garbage Pail Kids" is not a great movie, but it's definitely not the worst I've ever seen. I would have much rather seen the cartoon, but they never aired it on the station where I lived then. . .