Stream-Of-Consciousness Review: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Title?: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

First or second time viewing?: First

Preconceptions?: A movie notoriously bad enough to have garnered a cult of the kind of fans who like found footage compilations. Not sure if I really remember hearing that or if I’m being blindly optimistic.

Program start:

“A Topps Chewing Gum Production.” Love it.

Okay, the Garbage Pail Kids are presented in this film as aliens. Didn’t the Masters Of The Universe movie do the same thing? And obviously none of the “violent death” characters are gonna fly in this movie; only the “gross bodily functions” ones.

Music, acting, dialogue, editing and direction are all off in a way that suggests Troll 2 or a Mentos commercial. Holy shit, it’s dubbed?

MacKenzie Astin plays a 14-year-old named Dodger, who aggressively hits on a girl who looks about 20 (a boy after my own heart). She’s the girlfriend of a bully (gangster?) who dresses like Sonny Crockett. Dodger picks a fight with the gangsters and cops a feel on the other 20-year-old girl.

The gangsters drag Dodger into the sewer and drench him in a steady stream of shit-water! Has Danny Boyle seen this movie?

The Garbage Pail Kids’ romp through the magical old British guy’s magical curio shop is as ineptly staged and edited as the drawbridge scene in Maximum Overdrive.

The design of the Kids’ heads is awesomely cheap. It adds an extra nightmarish quality–like a Syd & Marty Kroft show with shit, piss, farts and vomit. There totally needs to be a Garbage Pail Kids dark ride at Enchanted Forest.

The Sonny Crockett guy’s name is Juice. Juice’s girlfriend takes Dodger with her to “sell clothes” at “the dance clubs.” I’m pretty sure she really just said that. Yep. They’re selling clothes. In the parking lot of a dance club. With a really bad country song about being a “big big man” playing inside.

The Kids’ mouths are only articulated in their close-up shots.

It’s reminding me of Rumble In The Bronx a bit as well–the dubbing, the fashions. Where the fuck did they film this? Is it Italian?

An orgy of product placement as the Kids sit down to dinner. One of them yells, “We’re the Pepsi generation!”

The Kids sew Dodger a Sgt. Pepper coat to help him attract the woman of his dreams. She wants him to make more clothes that she can sell. Cue the sweatshop sequence.

Holy shit, this thing is a fucking musical.

Oh, dear lord.

Oh.

Some of the Kids take a field trip to a movie theater, dressed as perverts: raincoats and sunglasses.; the others go to a bar named “The Toughest Bar In The World.” Ali Gator bites a biker’s toes off. He’s got a total foot fetish. The bikers like the Garbage Pail Kids because they’re spunky.

The Kids get scatological revenge on the clothes-bootlegging gang members for Dodger. And now Dodger and the magical old Brit are gonna help boost the Kids’ friends from the State Home for the Ugly.

Nice fake Madonna song during the clothes-selling montage.

The Kids are a stand-in for the 14-year-old geeks who collected these cards in the ’80s. They are shown to have talents that the beautiful people can appreciate. And of course, the beautiful people exploit them for it.

Two Kids are caught playing doctor inside a steamer trunk.

The Kids issue a cryptic threat to Dodger if he betrays them. It gives them a little more of an old school fairy tale quality. They’re like subservient but vengeful Djinns. That vomit and fart.

The girlfriend is setting Dodger up. I suspect the trollop succubus is going to learn a lesson at the end of the movie, but man, wouldn’t it be something if the movie had the balls to end like Freaks?

Do you suppose it could end that way? Now that I think about it, the movie kinda resembles Freaks up until this point. Cleopatra and Hercules betraying Hans. The gang sells the Kids to the State Home while the Mentos Jezebel stages a fashion show with Dodger’s clothes. Santa’s locked up in the State Home for being fat.

The bikers agree to help Dodger bust the Kids out, which proves to be unnecessary, as the Old Magic Brit easily dispatches its only security guard. If this doesn’t end like Freaks, it’s possible it may end like…

Yep. I called it. It’s ending like Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.

The end credits song sounds like Buckner & Garcia.

John fucking Buechler worked on the design of the Kids’ heads. No wonder they suck.

Afterthoughts:

It’s still better than Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

A Bit Of Context

It should be stated at the outset that these are not traditional reviews; they are an experiment in stream of consciousness documentation of uncensored thoughts that occur while watching these movies.

The first few times I spelunked  into this territory were day-long marathons watching uber-disturbing horror movies, drinking wine and making notes on my deteriorating mental state. The process was fun enough, and the results interesting enough (to me, at least) to want to continue. I heartily recommend that you’ve seen the movies discussed before you read the essays, as I will not always describe plot in full detail, and will spoil every last goddamned thing about it for you.

Stream-of-Consciousness Reviews: “Antichrist”

Antichrist (2009): Written/Directed by Lars Von Trier

A man who cannot grieve the loss of his son (he toddled out of a bedroom window while he and his wife were having slow-motion sex) focuses his attention on forcing his wife to experience her own grief, step by step, as fully as possible. He manipulates her into it, and she completely submits. He abuses her and she can’t say no. This is how I also remember Breaking The Waves being, and everything I’ve heard about Dancer in the Dark and Dogville seems to revolve around the same theme: the brutal and protracted punishment of a helpless woman, and how it is her lot to endure what is visited upon her. Call it a gender flip on Mel Gibson’s martyrdom complex, call it emotional torture porn, but at this point it definitely feels like a fetish on Von Trier’s part.

She and He (those are their names, no kidding) retreat to their forest cabin (named Eden, no kidding!) where she left her thesis on “Gynocide” unfinished, in order to help her face her deepest fear. Like Gaspar Noe, Von Trier exhibits a 20-year-old’s lack of subtlety.

Dafoe’s character probably also feels that he can atone for his part in his son’s death by healing his wife of her grief.

She sees fertility as a curse—an invitation to grief for everything that is to die.

Her thesis research led her to believe that women have brought all the misogyny they suffer upon themselves. LVT has written a female character who believes women do not control their bodies, that they are cursed with passivity. She surrenders to the ancient patriarchal archetype of woman, which makes the entire movie play like a primal male fantasy.

Is her character actually saying that men are evil to women because women were evil first? Well, duh: “Eden,” “Antichrist,” no subtlety here, remember?

Oh my fucking god, Lars just stole an image from Jorg Buttgereit! The blood-spurting penis!

She drills a hole in his leg, rapes the wound with her finger, then affixes a grindstone through it. Okay, I’ll admit it: that image is pretty fucking brilliant.

Besides Nekromantik, I sense some lifting from Long Weekend—another “bickering couple succumbs to nature” movie.

He hides from her in a hole in the ground—hiding from his wife in Mother Earth’s vagina.

It’s hard to tell if the film is really trying to suggest that the evil of women “begat” the evil of men, or that the cultural conditioning runs so deep that these characters cannot escape it. It certainly feels like it’s implying the former, but I’m trying to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The flashback in Chapter 4 suggests that she saw her son moving toward the window, and did nothing. Her memories are either becoming distorted, or becoming clear for the first time.

Again, the rusty-scissor clit-snipping reminds me of Buttgereit—Der Todesking this time.

She provokes him into killing her, which seems to be what she’s wanted the whole time. The movie is incredibly Freudian, and I cannot help but think of Freud’s famous quote: “The great question that has never been answered, and that I have not yet been able to answer after thrity years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

After he kills her, a mass of women climb a hill toward him. He is delivered into the world now that he and she are no longer “the only two people” in it. Either his problems are over or just beginning.

Afterthoughts:

During the movie, I found myself compelled to see Antichrist as a fully misogynist tract. My opinion of it has since slightly softened, but I certainly haven’t grown to see it as at all insightful about the human condition. Rather, I see it as a cry of confusion regarding the female of the species, cynically uninterested in solutions or new models of thought about male/female dynamics; an admission of identification with Freud’s least evolved and most reptile-brained theories.

Incredible imagery, though. No denying that.

Interview up at horroregonian.us

Jack Maraglia, the brains behind the Horroregonian website, was kind enough to talk with me about Shadow Play as well as Second Skin.  Click here to check it out:

http://horroregon.us/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=62:horroregonian-willy-greer&catid=25:interviews&Itemid=30

Thanks to Jack and co. for the time and webspace!