A Few Reasons The Garbage Pail Kids The Movie (1987) was terrible

Double Toasted did a great review about this movie and I have to say they were pretty spot on...I'd even seen a few things that I had no idea about until I watched bits and pieces again. I'll give four reasons I believe the movie was terrible 

Undermining their point

The point of the movie was supposedly that "Ugliness is on the inside" but the Garbage Pail Kids (hereafter referred to as GPK) are ugly to the bone!. They rob a Pepsi truck, harass movie patrons, Windy Winston and Ali Gator start a bar brawl and Valerie Vomit keeps hitting on Dodger. After GPK are done with that, they sing a song about working together…while they’re robbing a store

When Captain Manzini tells Ali Gator that he can’t change the way he looks, but can help how they behave, Windy Winston farts…AGAIN…pretty much saying “That’s what I think of your words, just empty wind”

Then, toward the end they want us to feel sorry for them for not going to Tangerine's fashion show (they DID work so hard on the clothes) but do we REMEMBER what happened THE LAST TIME they went out...they wrought havoc, and I don't feel sorry for them at all. Ending up trash compacted would've been the best fate for them. We all know it 

It's funny...by accident

The Garbage Pail Kids movie is unintentionally funny. When Ali Gator bites the guy's toes in the bar, what's funny is him attempting to get away and beaten up because he deserved it. 

Windy Winston farting in the bartender's face and yanking away his mustache was supposed to be funny...but it's ACTUALLY funny because after watching it a few times to review it…I wanted to be that mustache…GONE!

When the GPK steal the Pepsi truck and leave the driver in his boxers It just makes them look juvenile. This IS a movie for kids, but that moment talks down to them in 

the worst way

Foul Phil thinks everyone is his parent and ONE intentionally funny scene is where Tangerine offers him Binaca for halitosis 

Foul Phil has bad breath, Windy Winston farts, Nat Nerd pees his pants constantly and said "I thought it was funny" yeah Nat...it's not...I don't think I had a genuine laugh outside of the Binaca gag. The jokes regarding the GPK are one dimensional and based solely on their shtick. Messy Tessy gets a joke with using her snot to reanimate a TV but no one cares. 

The animatronics are hilarious because of how bad it is, Ali Gator's mouth is open for most of the movie (Thank you IHE for pointing this out)

The prosthetics hinder them from using full facial expressions (Windy Winston is in mid sentence here)

Valerie Vomit's eyes look in two different directions, and the ADR'd voices are well, passable 

The humor is totally accidental...  

Unlikeable Characters

The characters are terrible, except for Dodger. I actually liked Dodger, while Captain Manzini was okay, he tried to be so Shakespearean that I felt he tried to elevate it beyond the garbage script it was 

Tangerine's character is so predatory it is very uncomfortable watching her do everything she can to get him to pop wood and keep her manipulation strong. In reality, they were dating and broke up in the middle of the film. Yet, the height difference between the two made the age gap of a year look like it was probably 5 years or more. 

The GPK are terrible characters, even though they save Dodger's life in their introductory off screen moment, the next thing they do is ransack the antique shop on top of the other things I've talked about

Juice, the neighborhood bully is too old to be bullying a 14 year old 

It seems like Rob Zombie saw this and said "This is how to create characters" and used it as a prototype to write Haddonfield characters in his Halloween films

Nonsensical story

The story is that the GPK are in a Garbage can rocket to Earth and land in Captain Manzini’s antique shop.

Dodger is being chased by people too old to be bullying a teenager and chaining him up to a pipe and drowning him. He is saved by the GPK and promises to help them find their friends in the State Home for the Ugly

Tangerine, Juice’s girlfriend manipulates Dodger into making clothes for her, the GPK actually made the clothes. She sells out the kids to Juice after picking up a batch of clothes from them, who in turn sells them to the State Home for the Ugly

Manzini tries to get them back into the pail and tell them th at they can change the way they behave, but it doesn’t take as they’re disgusting criminals that exceed the limit of allowable mischievousness while remaining likeable

After busting out the GPK from the State Home for the Ugly where GPK got sold to by Juice, they ruin Tangerine's fashion show and Dodger finally beats up Juice. Dodger later tells Tangerine "I don't think you're pretty anymore" and walks away

The entire movie seems to be a collection of things that would have been a passable cartoon movie, but set in real life though...it's can't pass muster. Maybe it should've been an animated movie but it would've had to have a story and likeable characters. This movie doesn't have any of it. 

These are four reasons The Garbage Pail Kids movie was ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE 

My score a 1 garbage pail out of 5