When There’s No More Room in Hell a New Garbage Pail Kids Movie Will Walk the Earth

Steve Barton   |  

Mar 12, 2012

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The only comfort I take from the news that former Disney chief Michael Eisner’s production company is planning a new big screen version of the popular gross-out Eighties trading cards The Garbage Pail Kids is that it cannot possibly be worse than 1987’s live-action abomination.

We all know that one of the current memes in Hollywood is “if it was popular in the 80’s, we have to revive it for the big screen”, but a movie based on a line of trading cards that haven’t been popular for a quarter of a century that already spawned one of the worst movies in the history of cinema?

Deadline Hollywood stunned the world today breaking the exclusive news that Michael Eisner’s The Tornante Company will finance and develop a new feature film based on the controversial 1985 Garbage Pail Kids trading cards that were brought to life by Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Art Spiegelman and only existed in the first place as a parody of The Cabbage Patch Dolls, another fairly irrelevant property in the 21st century. It’s probably no coincidence that the cards were published by Topps and Eisner bought that trading card company back in 2007.

Apparently Topps has been trying to revive the property with a new series of cards off and on over the past decade. That this is the first I’m hearing about it should tell you how successful that has been.

An award-winning short filmmaker who goes only by the initials PES and a fledgling screenwriter named Mike Vukadinovich (a script of his made it onto last year’s “black list” and IMDB has Amanda Seyfried attached to star in another dramedy he penned) have the unenviable task of trying to resurrect this property for 21st century audiences.

The one thing going in their favor is that whatever they come up with has to be better than the unwatchable 1987 film version. If you’ve never experienced the soul-crushing agony that is The Garbage Pails Kids movie, then gouge your eyeballs on the trailer below. Sitting through that film from beginning to end isn’t entertainment; it’s a testament to human willpower.

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