John Astin Tried To Stop His Son From Starring In One Of The Worst Movies Ever Made

One of life's great pleasures is watching a terrible film with a group of friends, and I genuinely love bad movies: Give me "Plan 9 from Outer Space," "Manos: The Hands of Fate," or "Hard Ticket to Hawaii" and I'll make a case for why they are five-star cult classics. There are limits, however, and even I must draw the line at "The Garbage Pail Kid Movie," one of those rare cinematic disasters with a 0% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One thing I will say is that no fault lies with its young star, Mackenzie Astin, although maybe he should've taken his dad's advice when the role came along.

Perhaps the movie seemed like a good idea at the time. The Garbage Pail Kids were the hottest trading cards on the playground in the mid-'80s, a grotesque and irreverent parody of the more wholesome Cabbage Patch Dolls. The cards sold over 800 million units and Astin not only counted himself as a fan, he saw the live-action adaptation as a chance to make the leap to the big screen after finding success in NBC's sitcom "The Facts of Life." 

Astin's father, John, best known as Gomez in the original "The Addams Family" TV show, smelled trouble coming a mile off and offered some advice (via Mental Floss):

"The contracts were signed by the time my dad had a chance to look at the script. He did everything he could to get me out of it. Like, 'Dude. This is not a good idea, son. I know what I'm talking about.' But the ink was dry."

Astin Senior's judgement was sound. "The Garbage Pail Kids Movie" has gained notoriety as one of the worst films ever made, and his boy was stuck right in the middle of it.

The very gross occupants of a garbage can-shaped spacecraft have found refuge in a tatty antique store owned by Captain Manzini (Anthony Newley), who insists that they must never be unleashed on the outside world. Naturally, that's exactly what happens when a fight breaks out between his young employee Dodger (Mackenzie Astin) and the gang of street toughs who routinely terrorize him. At their best, the original trading cards were wildly imaginative, but we get lumbered with a bunch of also-rans mostly defined by bodily functions: Valerie Vomit; snot-dripping Messy Tessie; bad-breathed baby Foul Phil; flatulent Windy Winston; and Nat Nerd, a bespectacled geek who keeps wetting himself. Greaser Greg and Ali Gator make up the very ho-hum gang.

Dodger has a crush on the gang leader's girlfriend Tangerine (Katie Barberi), who dreams of becoming a famous fashion designer. To get in her good books, he enlists the Kids to make clothes for her to sell outside a nightclub. Fed up with slave labor, they leave their basement sweat shop to annoy people in a cinema and start a fight in a biker bar. Thanks to Tangerine's schemes, they are captured and imprisoned in the State Home for the Ugly, but Dodger and Captain Manzini rescue them in time to cause mayhem at her fashion show. Overall, "The Garbage Pail Kids Movie" sends a very muddled message to the young target audience. Its central theme that people shouldn't be judged by their appearance is totally undermined by the fact that the mischievous aliens are apparently just as vile on the inside as they are on the surface.

The hype is real: "The Garbage Pail Kids Movie" is almost unwatchable and deserves its reputation as one of cinema's worst stinkers. Starting with the positives, however, Mackenzie Astin isn't bad. He's no Corey Feldman or Corey Haim, but he is still a likeable lead and clearly tried his best to make his scenes work. Unfortunately, he's usually playing second banana to the Garbage Pail Kids themselves.

William Butler's character designs are so repulsive that they break the film whenever they're on screen, which is obviously a fatal flaw when they are supposed to be the star attractions. These creeps look like the Kids have grown up, gone to seed, and smoke 60 a day. The animatronic component of their faces regularly malfunctioned on set, which means you have little people actors running around in oversized fake heads with gaping mouths and vacant eyes that only intermittently move. It's a deep plunge into uncanny valley and the obnoxious disembodied voice work completes the unnerving effect. To make matters even worse, the puerile screenplay defines them only by their gross gimmicks and results in a dispiriting lack of charm or personality.

"The Garbage Pail Kids Movie" has none of those accidentally sublime moments of humor or invention that you might find in a "so bad it's good" movie, and it doesn't even have any value as a kitschy relic of the '80s. The stench lingered so long that even a new "Garbage Pail Kids" film was canceled in 2013 due to the original's overwhelmingly negative legacy. If you're still tempted to see what all the fuss is about, don't say we didn't warn you!