The Original GARBAGE PAIL KIDS Movie Pitch Was a Horror Serial Killer Story
Before director Rod Amateau jumped on board to helm The Garbage Pail Kids Movie in 1987, the movie was set to be directed by John Carl Buechler. Buechler was best known for directing films such as Troll, Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Ghoulies Go to Collage, and more. He mostly worked in special effects on a ton of film projects over the years.
Buechler’s initial pitch for The Garbage Pail Kids was a straight-up horror movie concept, and it sounds like it would have been an insane movie! What we do know about the story he pitched was that The Garbage Pail Kids would have spawned from radioactive sludge that had found its way to a garbage can filled with broken dolls, and it would have turned them into serial killers!
That sounds like it would have made a much better movie than the one we got! A bunch of Garbage Pail Kids serial killers running around town murdering people!? What a wild movie that might have been.
What’s funny, is that Topps wanted something more light-hearted and kid-friendly! If you watch the movie now, it is definitely not light-hearted or kid-friendly! The movie is an absolute gross-out nightmare! I watched the movie a couple of months ago, and I can’t believe that it got made!
You can hear us share our thoughts on the movie in our previously released Secret Level podcast. We go into a lot of detail about the making of the film and the madness of shooting it.
While Buechler did not direct the movie, he did work on the special effects and was the man behind the creation of the ultra-creepy masks and costumes instead, which were torturous for the actors that had to wear them. When talking about working with the dwarves in the costumes, the director shared his take on the whole thing, and it was wild! This is what he said:
“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.”
As I rewatched the movie as an adult I couldn’t believe that this movie actually got made. Concepts like a state home for ugly people, teenagers that looked like adults attempting to kill a little kid, and Garbage Pail Kids watching a kid bathe in the middle of the basement, are all so wildly wrong!
What do you think about the serial killer horror version of the film? Would you have liked to see that one get made?