The crazy costumes in THE GARBAGE PAIL MOVIE were a torturous nightmare – “You shoot until they can breathe”

The children’s film The garbage can (1987) is a terrible film and worthy of shivering on so many levels. I recently revisited it for our Secret Level and Holy Cow podcast! The movie was much worse than I remembered! It was that bad!

Children’s garbage bucket Movie it certainly had its fair share of production problems, but one of the craziest involved the grotesque costumes the actors wore in the film. 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 repair the heads and hope they worked. Kevin Thompson who played Ali Gator in the film explained that this was a problem because due to the masks repeatedly retouched with paint during production, the fumes from the paint in the masks were rough.

Effects artist William Butler he 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 placed on the actors’ heads. Thompson told Mental Floss:

“When the mouths opened, they tore on both sides like the Joker. We only had a butt, and if it broke, production was stopped, so you had to make it durable.”

Not only were the masks difficult to put on, but they were a threat to the health of the actors! The film was shot in a warehouse in California where temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, which in itself feels like a nightmare. The actors also had trouble seeing and hearing with the giant heads and could run out of oxygen if they wore them for too long.

That’s not all, though! The masks seemed to have a mind of their own because of the remote controls. Thompson explained: “The metal roof screwed with the remote controls. Suddenly, the eyes started buzzing in circles.” So that made shooting a lot more difficult.

One of those actors who had to be these things, Arturo Gilspoke about his experiences with the bosses explaining:

“We had limited vision and sometimes missed our final grade. Sometimes, the production would put duct tape on the floor to help us follow a path so we wouldn’t bump into furniture or other cast members. We could barely hear the other actor’s dialogue as we had servants screeching in our heads animating our characters’ facial features. Not only were the animatronic heads difficult to put on, the minions inside the huge heads made dialogue delivery difficult. We literally had to shout our lines so Anthony Newley and Mackenzie Astin could hear us. Our voices were muffled in our heads. Many times, Rod Amateau had to scream “cut” several times because we couldn’t hear “.

Rod Amateur he was the director of the film, and his take on the whole thing is actually quite shocking! Like seriously, I can’t believe he said this, but here we are:

“We took some 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 try everything without the heads, put the heads, have a paramedic [with] a stopwatch. The little motherfuckers go in there and you say “action” and shoot until they can breathe. “

What the hell!? Yes, those working conditions would certainly not conform to today’s cinema standards. And just as he says this is completely socially unacceptable! This whole thing feels like complete madness! They made movies like this, and that’s the kind of attitude that directors had!

Let’s talk about this and more in an episode of our Secret Level podcast you can listen to below!