The Crazy Costumes In THE GARBAGE PAIL MOVIE Were a Torturous Nightmare - "You Shoot Until They Can't Breathe"

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) is a terrible, cringe-worthy film on so many levels. I recently revisited it for our Secret Level podcast, and holy cow! The movie was so much worse than I remembered! It was so bad!

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie certainly had its fair share of production issues, but one of the craziest involved the grotesque costumes that the little people actors wore in the movie. These costumes were essentially torture devices!

There was only one head for each costume that was made because they didn’t have the budget for multiple heads in case one got ruined. So, the production team had to constantly mend the heads and hope they worked. Kevin Thompson who played Ali Gator in the film explained that this was an issue because due to the masks being repeatedly touched up with paint during production, the paint fumes in the masks were rough.

Effects artist William Butler used acrylic paint for the mask, which was not a substance that allows for flexibility. So, when the paint dried and hardened, things got especially grotesque when they were placed on the heads of the actors. Thompson told Mental Floss:

"As the mouths opened up, they ripped on both sides like the Joker. We only had one head each, and if it got ruined, production got shut down, so you had to make it durable."

Not only were the masks difficult to wear, but they were a threat to the actors' health! The film was shot in a warehouse in California where temperatures reached over a hundred degrees, which seems like a nightmare in itself. The actors also had trouble seeing and hearing with the giant heads on and they could run short of oxygen if they had them on too long.

That’s not all, though! The masks seemed to have a mind of their own due to the radio controls. Thompson explained: "The metal roof screwed with the radio controls. All of a sudden, the eyes would start whirring around in a circle." So that just made the shoot all that much more difficult.

One of those actors who had to were these things, Arturo Gil, talked about his experiences with the heads explaining:

“We had limited vision and sometimes we would miss our final mark. At times, the production would put tape on the floor to help us follow a path so that we wouldn’t bump into furniture or the other cast members. We could hardly hear the other actor’s dialogue as we had servos grinding inside our heads animating the facial features of our characters. Not only were the animatronic heads difficult to wear, the servos inside the huge heads made dialogue delivery difficult. We literally had to scream out our lines so that Anthony Newley and Mackenzie Astin could hear us. Our voices were muffled in the heads. Many times, Rod Amateau had to scream ‘cut’ several times because we could not hear.”

Rod Amateau was the director of the movie, and his take on the whole thing is actually pretty shocking! Like seriously, I can’t believe he said this, but here we go:

“We got dwarves and put heads on them, and found out how long they could survive in there without breathing, and it turned out to be about five, seven minutes. So you had to rehearse everything without the heads on, put the heads on, have a paramedic [with] a stop watch. Little sons of bitches go in there, and you say ‘action’, and you shoot until they can’t breathe.”

What the hell!? Yeah, those working conditions definitely wouldn’t fly with today’s standards of filmmaking. And just how he says this is completely socially unaccepted! This whole thing seems like complete madness! They used to make movies like this, and that’s the kind of attitude that filmmakers had!

We talk about this and more on an episode of our Secret Level podcast which you can listen to below!