GARBAGE PAIL KIDS

TYPICAL REVIEW

"There's few experiences quite like watching Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie. I really, really mean that. It’s just amazingly bad on every level, and if you've never seen it, believe me when I say that it's thirty times worse than anything you could imagine."
– X-ENTERTAINMENT

THE PLOT

Ali Gator, Valerie Vomit, Messy Tessie, and a handful of other stomach churning alien beings emerge from a garbage can of toxic waste to help a downtrodden earth kid defeat some thugs, track down their missing friends, and learn that physical beauty isn’t everything in life.

THE POINT

In 1987, MGM decided to make a motion picture adaptation of the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, the ultra gross-out parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids, and market it to kids under twelve. AND NOBODY TOLD THEM NOT TO.

They made a movie aimed at kids under twelve featuring characters so disturbing to look at that some children actually asked to leave the theater shortly after the film started. AND NOBODY TOLD THEM NOT TO.

They made a movie aimed at kids under twelve where the main character, a child himself, is repeatedly beaten by the villains and, at one point, left to die chained to a sewer pipe. AND NOBODY TOLD THEM NOT TO.

They made a movie aimed at kids under twelve where the heroes discover that the missing Garbage Pail Kids have held captive and then brutally murdered in the basement of the State Home for the Ugly. Oh, as a side note, also locked in cages in the basement; Santa Claus and Ghandi. This is the movie they marketed to kids under twelve. AND NOBODY TOLD THEM NOT TO.

In Christianese, a sin of omission is a “willful neglect or positive refusal to perform some good action that one’s conscience urges one to do.” What’s the difference between that and any other sin, you might ask? Well, we can look at it this way. When a person purposely does something evil, that’s known as a Transgression. But when a person could have done something good, and purposely didn’t, that’s an Omission. Following this reasoning, the Catechism states that "we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them…by not disclosing or not hindering them when we have an obligation to do so.” That's a lot of technical talk for something that's pretty much common sense, isn’t it? If we see someone doing something wrong or harmful, we should at least point it out. And they should do the same for us.

But in today’s social climate, this is really one of the trickier parts of the concept of sins of omission. These days, any time you dare mention that someone might be doing something that might not be in their best interest, you’re immediately accused of “judging” or “condemning” that person. “You can’t judge me!” has become the ultimate shut up to us religious types.

It’s also a scam. It’s true, we have absolutely no authority to judge another person’s soul or condemn them to the Hell of eternal separation from God. But we have been commanded to watch out for one another, to teach each other, and to step in and say something when we have the chance to. Obviously, how we go about doing this may change from situation to situation, and we can’t force someone to listen when they don’t want too, but we are expected to make the effort.

So, the next time you see someone going down a self-destructive path, and wonder if you should say something, just remember Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie and think how much better the world could have been if someone had just stepped up and said, “Uh, look, maybe we should think about this just a little more before we do it.”

THE STINGER

Why bother with the distinction between sins of omission and other types of sin when it's all bad? Well, because Jesus did in parables like Matthew 25. That's the one where He is asked, "When did we see you hungry and NOT feed you, or thirsty and NOT give you drink?" and Jesus answers with, "Whatever you DID NOT for one of the least brothers of mine, you DID NOT for me." Jesus throws in this “sins of omission” thing, and suddenly, there’s a lot more to being a good person than just following the rules. The checklist version of religion with all of the “thou shalt nots” goes right out the window. It's not enough to just make the occasional trip to confession and rattle off a few of the commandments we broke. It's not enough to whisper a few quick apologies to God for our slip-ups before drifting off to sleep. As difficult as those things can be, they turn out to be the easier part. Instead, we’re also expected to consider those things we should have done, but decided not to do. Great!

COMING ATTRACTIONS: GARBAGE PAIL KIDS

More trailers for old posts.

DRACULA 2000

TYPICAL REVIEW

"There is ... very little that this film does right, and I can identify nothing to justify its existence." - James Berardinelli, REELVIEWS

THE PLOT

Well, as you might guess from the film’s title, it’s the year 2000, and Dracula gets set loose by a bunch of thieves who find his coffin in a vault which they believed would contain priceless works of art. Since there is no art in the place, the thieves decide to take the coffin instead. How do such stupid people come by the money to afford the high-tech equipment these goons are toting around? Anyway, once free, Dracula proceeds to bite some people, who bite some other people, and so on. C’mon, it’s a vampire movie, what else did you expect. Along the way, we're treated to some obligatory Buffy-style kung-fu vampire slaying, a laughable mid-air sex scene with pop singer Vitamin C (You know, sometimes, when you're discussing these movies, you just have to pause and stare in wonder at what you've just written.), and some convoluted reworkings of characters from Bram Stoker's novel. It all ends badly.

THE POINT

Sometimes, if you stick it out through one of these movies, you might find that there’s actually an interesting idea buried in amongst the bad dialogue, undeveloped characters and stunning lack of logic.

What’s interesting in this film is that Dracula is not identified as the ancient European bad-guy Vlad the Impaler, but is instead (get ready) Judas Iscariot. That’s right, in this movie, after betraying Jesus and choosing suicide rather than seeking forgiveness; Judas receives the horrible curse of becoming the first vampire. (Don’t bother trying to find this incident in the Bible, it isn’t there.)

It’s a pretty clever take on the vampire myth and offers a unique explanation on why many of the vampire legends are so Christian centered. The undead are a mockery of true resurrection. The blood-sucking is a mockery of Communion. Vampires are weakened by Christian symbols such as the Cross, holy water, and silver (Judas’ 30 piece payoff, remember). And even though the movie doesn’t go there, you could even include the vampire’s dislike of garlic because Anne Emmerich, the lady who wrote one of Mel Gibson's favorites, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, claims that the meat at the Last Supper was seasoned with it. (I’ll accept my award for most outstanding useless trivia now, thank you.)

That’s all fun, but what really makes this movie interesting is when you put it in the context of a gospel reading like the scene in Matthew 18. This is the oft repeated story where Peter approaches Jesus and asks him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus answers, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times."

I was reminded of this passage after our heroine Mary, a cashier at the local Virgin Records Megastore (Get it? Good. Please direct all groans and complaints to the screenwriter.), manages to lure Dracula/Judas into a trap. Rather than immediately destroy the vampire, she offers him another choice. Why not just ask Jesus for forgiveness?

To his credit, Gerard Butler, the guy playing Judas, actually pulls off a decent bit of acting at this point as he considers the idea. Unfortunately, since there were already even worse sequels in the works (Does everything really NEED to be a trilogy these days?), Judas concludes that his sin was too horrible to be forgiven and must be set out to roast in the sunlight until the next movie.

The mistake that the Judas character in the film makes is, sadly, a very common one. It’s the inability to accept forgiveness once it’s offered. The realization of just how deeply we’ve hurt some of the people in our lives can often lead some of us to think there is no chance for reconciliation. Hearing someone say it just isn’t enough sometimes.

It’s a subtle trap, really; another kind of false pride. Listen, if you find yourself feeling like the worst of the worst, just read the Bible and take a look at some of the rouges gallery presented in its pages.

• Jacob – liar, thief – father of the twelve tribes of Israel
• King David – murderer, adulterer – called a man after God’s heart
• St. Paul – genocidal fanatic – wrote two-thirds of the New Testament

With a little forgiveness, those three ended up doing okay for themselves. And even if you have those guys beat, (frightening, but doubtful) you should step back and realize that when you don’t accept forgiveness, you are judging your own soul, and that’s God’s job, not yours. Accept the forgiveness Jesus offers, then go out do the same for someone else.

As the ever-questionable (but dead-right in this case) Wikipedia so neatly puts it in its article on this topic, “Forgiveness may be necessary for civilization, since without it, all wrongs would demand revenge, which may themselves be taken as wrongs requiring revenge, resulting in a spiraling escalation of retaliation, leading ultimately to utter destruction.” In its purest form, forgiveness is the elimination of a debt that could never be repaid. Jesus gave it to us, and for the good of our personal relationships, for the whole world really, we have to give it for each other, and to ourselves.

THE STINGER

It’s possible to forgive someone without re-establishing a relationship with them. As Bishop Joseph Ekuwen once said, "When someone offends you and makes an apology, you forgive them but keep them at an arms distance. You refuse to re-admit the other into your life. When you do this, reconciliation is missing." If we’re really trying to imitate God, then that means we can’t just forgive someone, we’re expected to reconcile with them. If they’re truly repentant, we’re expected in some way to try and bring them back into our lives. How 'freakin' hard is that?

COMING ATTRACTIONS: DRACULA 2000

Just doing a little retroactive continuity and adding trailers for some old posts.

WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?

In Acts 17 of the Christian New Testament, St. Paul finds an altar in Athens dedicated to the “Unknown God”. It was one of those little stone thingies Tertullian mentions which the Greeks would erect just to make sure they were covering all their bases godwise. You never know when some wandering Bulgarian Samodivi might wander into town and want a little sacrafice. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Paul uses the altar as a springboard for conversation with the locals about his new religion and its "Unknown God", Jesus. Kind of a pop culture approach to things, I suppose. It’s in that spirit that I present the B-Movie Catechism.

You see, I like bad movies. No, that's not quite true. I LOVE bad movies. I’m not proud of it; I’m just being honest. And, I’ve watched a lot of them. No, that's not quite true, either. I've watched an (ahem) ungodly amount of them. Hell, I've BOUGHT an ungodly amount of them!

So instead of just tossing out the hours of my life I've spent watching these things, I thought I could use them to spark a little bit of religious discussion, even though it’s a sure bet the people who made these movies never had such a thing in mind. And just to be clear at the start of this, I'm in no way officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church either. Really, when you stop to think about it, this is probably doomed from the offset. I readily admit the seeming incompatibility of the teachings of a 2000 year old religion with movies whose subject matter is most often confined to what Joe Bob Briggs called the three Bs: Blood, Breasts, & Beasts.

But, I'm stupid enough to try anyway.

Besides, even The Catechism of The Catholic Church states in Section 24 that we should suit our words to the understanding of our hearers. Father Thomas Richstatter, O.F.M., S.T.D put it this way, "Catholics believe that being human is a good thing. Our bodies are good. Creation is good. Growth and change are good. That's why it's great to belong to a human Church—a Church that is forever growing, developing and maturing—a Church that is always discovering new ways to proclaim the gospel until that day when the fullness of God's plan will be revealed in us." Well, for better or worse, this is my new way.

Hopefully, the few people who stumble across this thing will find something useful or thought-provoking in it, whether it be religious in nature or just an old movie they hadn't considered renting before. That’s the idea, anyway, behind The B-Movie Catechism. We'll see if anything comes of it.