In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, it’s warped gross-out kids film Problem Child 2, a spite project with more than a few all-timer scenes of bad taste.
Problem Child 2
The next time you feel naughty, devious or devilish, I want you to let the opening riff from ‘Bad To The Bone’ play inside your head. I want you to turn to an imagined fourth wall, shoot the people a Grinch-like evil grin, and wiggle your eyebrows up and down in a manner that confirms to this unseen audience that you are an ingenious lil stinker with Satanic plans in mind.
That’s how Junior (Michael Oliver) does it, in the purposefully putrid Problem Child franchise. He’s the creation of screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, best known for their screenplays of such biopic subjects as Ed Wood, Larry Flynt, and OJ Simpson. The pair are clearly drawn to amoral outsiders, and their first success was the original Problem Child: allegedly written as a sophisticated black comedy for adults, that studio Universal sanitised into a more straightforward family diversion. Nobody could levy such criticisms of sanitisation against the sequel, which the writers later admitted was their attempt at a “Pasolini or John Waters film for children.” The film’s suburban setting is even named Mortville, an outright reference to the outrageous homeless shanty-town in Waters’ Desperate Living.
When we hear ‘Bad To The Bone’, signalling that Oliver’s titular devilchild is about to cause some problems, we are entirely unprepared for just how mean-spirited Problem Child 2 is in its humour, all while still resembling a kiddy movie on its cartoonish surface. I love a movie made from pure spite, rushed into production while studio heads seemingly didn’t appreciate the darkness they were inflicting upon family audiences. Problem Child 2 is the perfect thing for an evil godparent to screen while babysitting, radicalising their charge into a being of malice, mayhem and hunger to cause humiliation and existential pain.
The plot involves Junior’s harried dad Ben (a delightfully game John Ritter) trying to settle into a new neighbourhood and find a wife, his nuclear family plans constantly being steamrolled by Junior’s demonic trickery. He’s seduced by SNL star Laraine Newman as an evil and narcissistic Southern belle, but will ultimately pair up with a kindly school nurse, whose daughter Trixie (Ivyann Schwan) is just as much of a handful as Junior. She’s a Problem Child…2! The kids quickly fall into an Itchy and Scratchy dynamic, Junior hissing at her in one scene “the bitch must die!” He also calls his dad “pussywhipped”. Fun for the whole family.
But nobody’s here for the simple plot of a father trying to reconcile his suburban dreams with his nightmarish offspring’s unmanageable personality disorders. Let me cut to the chase and just highlight two unforgettable scenes. In the first, Junior sabotages a carnival attraction, hitting a switch that spins the riders at such a speed that they regurgitate milky vomit into each other’s faces. This is gross and funny enough, but you cannot conceive of how long and intense the gag is. It looks like every extra was equipped with about a gallon of fake vom, one dad spewing directly onto his child’s head. Only the drunken alleyway puking in Team America: World Police comes close.
In the film’s other most memorable moment, Junior targets the annoying family next door, where a pair of creepy twins who scream their dialogue in unison make the big mistake of ripping him off at their lemonade stand. Junior pisses in the emptied lemonade jug: we hear this for about 40 full seconds. Then, the twins’ clueless father buys a glass. We watch, agape, as the man thirstily chugs our child protagonist’s urine and exclaims: “Mmm, tangy!” He is also wearing an entirely pee-yellow ensemble, really driving the scene’s message home.
Sick shit like this earned the movie’s original cut an R rating from the MPAA, and the mind reels at whatever was excised in order to get the already-twisted final product into cinemas. Even beyond those jaw-droopingly distasteful moments, though, Problem Child 2 is abrasive in its every creative decision, letting Gilbert Gottfried shriek for minutes on end as Junior’s school principal and dressing each interior set in gaudy primary colours that make one feel like a hostage in a kindergarten-themed serial killer’s basement. Problem Child 2 makes Bart Simpson look like Tiny Tim, and it has a rotten black heart, and I indeed hope that John Waters has seen and enjoyed the movie. I reckon, like me, he’d get a kick out of it.
