The Garbage Pail Kids was a set of trading cards created in the mid-1980s by Art Spiegelman, the same man who would later legitimize the graphic novel for the mainstream with his MAUS books. Trading Garbage Pail Kids with a neighbor is one of my earliest childhood memories. The appeal of the Garbage Pail Kids lay mostly in the trading; not particularly in the silly names and pictures, but in the idea of collecting that continues to dominate children's culture. Thus, the Kids were ill-suited to a feature length movie to begin with, and the execution only got worse from there. Gruesome and gross in trading card form, they are downright repugnant onscreen, and, embodied by midgets sporting bulky costumes with little mobility, they wobble around like broken wind-up toys.

THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE, filmed with the visual flair of a tree stump, was made by nobodies and for designed for no one. Pinpointing an audience that is appropriate for it seems impossible; the cards were designed for young children, and those characters brought to life on the screen (Ali Gator, Greaser Greg, among others) provide ample fart, pee, and puke humor. But the material is also far too mature for children, and the lessons it provides often disturbingly unhealthy. THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS promotes, amongst other things, child labor, gambling, threatening others with knives, selling out to corporations, alcohol usage and children undressing in front of peers and adults. In perhaps the most mind-boggling sequence the Kids sing a song about teamwork (Sample line: "We can do anything by working with each other!") and then promptly put their teamwork to use by going on a massive crime spree, stealing whatever they like. Way to send a positive message to children! Why stop at breaking and entering and larceny, why not show the kids cooking crack cocaine?

In case you are wondering — and if you are may I suggest that you are eating too much broken glass — the origin of the Garbage Pail Kids is left unexplained. There are some overtures toward the notion that they are extra-terrestrial; the credits roll over an image of the Earth from space as a garbage can shaped space ship flies past, but that is as far as that idea is taken. In the film they are contained, naturally, in a garbage pail, located in the antique shop of one Captain Manzini (Anthony Newley), who will not tell his young assistant Dodger (MacKenzie Astin) where he acquired it, only to say that it, like Pandora's Box, should never be open. "It," he says, "is Pandora's Pail." This movie, I say, is Pandora's Video. Its case should never be opened.

Dodger (coincidentally, a 14-year-old who looks more like 11) has no home, no parents, and does not attend school. He spends all day working in Captain Manzini's shop, even though there are never any customers and there is nothing to do. Eventually, the Kids are released from their pail (no explanation how seven oversized tykes managed to fit in one garbage can either) and refuse to return to it. They like Dodger so they sew cool clothes he can use to impress Tangerine (Katie Barberi) the teenage fashion designer he likes. Later, they change their mind, and will only work if Dodger helps them release their friends from "The State Home For The Ugly" (where, it turns out, Santa Claus is locked up too for some reason). What do you think Art Spiegelman thought of the fact that his clever, anarchic creatures were turned into jaded, vindictive tailors?