Tag Archives: Retro horror

Editorials

Nostalgic Trauma 101: The Garbage Pails Kids Movie!

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I was lucky enough to be a kid throughout the 80s and have a first-hand experience with what is now, the glory days of nostalgia. One thing from my childhood that I was completely obsessed with was The Garbage Pail Kids, even at a ridiculously young age. I was three years old when GPK first hit the scene and was a bit of an oddball at that age loving both the insanely popular Cabbage Patch Kids while being immensely intrigued by all things horror, I remember being absolutely enthralled with the cards to the point where anytime we were at the store, I would beg the parents for a pack or two.

Actual pic of my room in 1986 so you know I ain’t bullshitting you.

The Garbage Pail Kids were TOPPS middle finger to Xavier Roberts and his CPK line as the infamous trading card company had initially wanted the license to put out some wax packs like pretty much every other pop culture entity had in the 80s and 90s. However, Roberts scoffed at the idea and turned the company down, in turn launching a series of cards in 1985 from artists at TOPPS poking fun of the toy line by making them even uglier than they already were with a gross-out factor. And thus was born the Garbage Pail Kids and a phenomenon of the 80s that is carried on to this very day with collectors catching new packs faster than your parents attempting to nab a CPK doll in 1983.

The line was so popular in fact that in 1987, a movie came along that (I think) was meant for kids… but hey it’s the 80s, and all kids’ movies were pretty damn dark anyway. It was almost like a rite of passage to help put some hair on our balls and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was in no way short of providing plenty of trauma to kids who watched it. Add in a tiny person with an alligator face who loves to eat fingers and we got ourselves a tried and true, 80s kids’ movie folks!

In all honesty, this movie is one of the worst films ever made, and as much as I love GPK and I actually did get a kick out of this movie as a kid, watching it as an adult even with those nostalgia goggles, it’s just one of the most fuck-awful films I’ve ever seen.  It’s a trash spectacle of Z-grade 80s cinema. But you know what? In all the mess that it is, I believe that also might be its saving grace. A movie, so terrible, so awful that most that have seen it, have wiped it from their memory or shrugged it off as some sort of fever dream could be the very reason that when people talk about it today, they just laugh their hardy asses off. No one actually gets MAD at how bad it is; just at that, it’s just so damn weird and wild that no one would ever take this shit seriously.

If you’re someone that hasn’t witnessed this chaotic shitshow, the plot is basically the “kids” are mutant alien children that live in a trash can and befriend a bullied kid named Dodger along with his only friend, an antique shop owner who somehow knows everything about these gross ass kids from outer space. And by kids, I mean piss-poor animatronics and puppetry that would scare the shit out of the likes of Freddy Krueger. These “kids” are fucking goddamn terrifying to look at and I don’t know if that was the intention or not, but I had nightmares for weeks about Ali Gator and even more so, Messy Tessie- the booger snot-faced kid with a face that just scared the ever-loving shit out of me by her just standing still- staring. Like the monster she rightfully is.

SHUDDERS.

Makeup f/x artist John Carl Buechler (director of TROLL and FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD) who was initially slated to direct wanted the GPK movie, originally pitched it to be a horror film, with people being turned into hideous Cabbage Patch-like monstrosities that terrorized a small town. Although I think that probably would have worked better for older audiences and would maybe stand the test of time for 80s kids of today, it obviously wouldn’t have worked at all for kids in 1987. And yet without even trying they made a horror movie anyway with those giant prosthetic heads. I want to believe Buechler did that on purpose to scare the shit out of the kiddies. Bravo, it worked.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie goes balls to the wall on every single level, but I can’t help but find some sick and twisted charm in it. This is a movie nobody should ever willingly watch, but one that everyone needs to see at least once. It’s horrifying, stupid, gross, offensive and so mesmerizing that you’ll feel comatose from horrifically bad 80s cheese that would never get green-lit today.

Or hey if you really hate someone, make sure to recommend this movie to them to ensure they’re out of your life forever.

At least the opening credits were a banger, eh?

Home Video Releases

Terror Vision Adds LINNEA QUIGLEY’S HORROR WORKOUT To Blu-Ray Home Release!

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It’s time to break a sweat with the undead! Terror Vision, the face of true underground cult horror vinyl, Blu-Ray, and cassette releases is bringing one of the finest in faithful favorites to Blu-Ray for the first time ever: Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout!

The 1989 aerobics video spoof with the horror element, Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout presents the scream queen in a fun, frightening adventure that will keep you in stitches as you shed some inches.

Per the website:

Terror Vision is happy to have rescued and restored the master tapes for presentation here along with a 5.1 audio mix. Stacked with new and archival special features and two versions of the movie to enjoy, this is the definitive release of a true genre classic.

The Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout masters were archived on 3M tape which was discovered years later to be notoriously bad for archiving films. Terror Vision and Gotham Photochemical meticulously recovered the picture from these damaged sources, removing mold and debris. Even though the picture and sound are great, you will see some stubborn flaws that couldn’t be fixed.  

Fit To Kill: Interview w/ Linnea Quigley

Sweatin’ To The Zombies: Interview w/ Kenneth J. Hall

Cemetery Dance: An Interview w/ Cynthia Garris

New Commentary with Linnea Quigley and Kenneth J. Hall – moderated by Terror Vision’s Brad Henderson

Newly Created Master from The Master Tapes

New 5.1 Mix Created from The Master Tapes

New Trailer

Isolated Score

Archival Commentary 

Archival Making Of Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout

Old Master with 2.0 Audio

You can pre-order your copy by clicking here as copies are expected to arrive at your door on or around May 1st, 2023.

Games

ABACABB: The Cheat Code That Forever Changed Gaming

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Back in the early 90s, the console wars heated up pretty intensely between Nintendo and Sega. Hell, we had gangs in our schoolyard dedicated to either system willing to fight each other over which was the superior gaming console. NES fans loyal to the Mushroom Kingdom believed it to be the OG and automatically better in every way while Sega Heads stood proud of being the more “mature” way of gaming mocking the kiddie games of NES. So which was better? I mean, there are certainly a lot of variables to consider, however, I’m not here to debate an age-old argument. But, I will point out that ONE of those systems converted some kids to switch sides all with one game that BOTH systems had in their arsenal, but with one small, but highly significant difference that both changed the quality of the game itself and hell made it that much more enjoyable.

That is, of course, ABACABB.

In honor of 30 years of Mortal Monday this year-the day the arcade game dropped to home game consoles– it’s pretty important we commemorate what we schoolkids gossipped about outside of the classroom about a game where we’d seen a character fighter rip their face off and breathe fire onto their opponent, reducing the other guy to ashes and bones. And there was BLOOD. Enough of it to make Sam Raimi envious. It was almost like the forbidden fruit for those of us with uptight parents and on September 13th, 1993, we got to take this now legendary beast of a game home on multiple different platforms, depending on which one you owned of course.

I mean, this was a pretty killer promo and to be honest, it’s pretty much the only thing we gaming enthusiasts talked about for months leading up to MORTAL MONDAY.

Alas, however, when you brought that long-awaited sucker home, you were in for an enraging awaking upon the first few minutes of play. So much so that anyone standing in your way wasn’t getting any friendships in terms of conversation when it came to talking about the game. The blood had been replaced by squirts of grey goo crap that looked like 4-day-old oatmeal. And even worse, NO FATALITIES. Thanks to pearl-clutching parents and congressmen shitbags, MK had been stripped of what made it unique among its peers to appease the elder whiners for the home video release.

Nintendo, the family-friendly console, had a pretty friendly reputation with politicians at the time who blasted games such as MK in particular for the violence and sanitized the game down to a barely PG rating. But Sega being the rebellious teenager it was, inserted its own middle finger to those opposing us of our right to play a game filled with blood and gore.

Sega engineer, Paul Carruthers who was on hand for the game’s final processing and debugging was the man behind the infamous code as he himself received permission to sneak blood and gore into the game from the higher-ups’. At the main menu, players could press down, up, left, left, A, right, and down, spelling out DULLARD, to reveal a cheat menu. In the secret screen, they could do things like enable blood, which also reinstated the original arcade fatalities, and choose which arena to fight in. According to lore, Acclaim worried that DULLARD would be too hard for players to remember. So ABACABB was born from Carruthers in retrospect to a pretty sweet Genesis album and Sega players could restore MK to all its violent glory.

The code was meant to be secret, but I don’t even think SEGA cared all too much as it hinted that there was one right in the game. SEGA stood for chaos friends. Fuck your censorship.

Mere weeks after Mortal Monday, Congress and Senator Joe Lieberman rallied to get parental guidance and ratings for video games mostly solely based on Mortal Kombat alone, and now with this added not-so-secret blood code from SEGA in the mix, it was only a matter of time before we got what we now know as these rating systems that we see on games purchased today; 30 years after MK dropped into our homes forever changing the history of at-home gaming.

At the end of the day and because of this cheat blood code, SEGA sold as much as five times more MORTAL KOMBAT games than Nintendo, which hit the Mario Party goers hard in the 16-bit console wars. However, NES learned their lesson when it was time to drop MK II and fully restored all the blood and guts into the game with no code needed.

Which was great because I want my characters to bleed…like…a lot.