The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Imagine parents sitting in the audience with their naughty children (who used their Cabbage Patch dolls as driveway obstructions for their Big Wheel obstacle courses) and feeling ruefully double-crassed. Read full review

Most disappointing are the seven 'Kids' themselves, played by midgets wearing elaborate headpieces. Their behavior is every bit as gross as their reputations: Valerie Vomit uses her digestive instability to win a fistfight; Windy Winston's chief weapon is flatulance; Nat Nerd graphically wets his pants. [24 Aug 1987, p.5]

The biggest problem is with the kids themselves, which are played by little people with electrically operated fake heads stuck on top of them. The kids have very little expression, and their voices seem disembodied. As a result, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie seems so much cheap fakery at a time when breathtakingly convincing special effects have become the rule rather than the exception. Read full review

A stunningly inept and totally reprehensible film. Read full review

Gross-out humor for children, cynically packaged with goody-goody morals that wouldn't convince the most naive parent or child. Read full review

This crude live-action takeoff on the Cabbage Patch phenomenon ought to have had star Anthony Newley humming "Stop the Movie, I Want to Get Off." Read full review

Obviously, commercial film has a proud history of appealing to our less noble instincts. But why does this particular thing fail so provocatively, going beyond mere stupidity into downright offensive? #2. Not just because it is charmless, humorless, cynical and mean- minded. Lots of movies are that. Yet Garbage Pail crosses the fine line where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. In fact, it invents a brand new genre: kiddie nihilism, a callow theatre of disgust. Antonin Artaud, meet Mr. Dressup. [26 Aug 1987]