Rating: 11/20 (Jeremy: 12/20; Fred: 2/20; Libby: no rating; Josh: fell asleep)
Plot: A kid loses his hair after encountering a pair of ghosts in a mansion that burned down. Later, he's visited by the ghosts who instruct him on how to make a concoction featuring just-the-right-amount of the titular spread. He follows the directions, and his hair starts growing absurdly. Then, his friend puts some on his junk. That really has nothing to do with the movie's plot, but if that happens in a movie, I'm going to mention it. Then, a sketchy art teacher kidnaps a bunch of children.
I can guarantee you that no matter how stupid you think my plot synopsis for this one is, the actual plot of the movie is even stupider. So much of this is just inexplicable, like the fever dream of a kid with the measles. There's an assortment odd characters--the villain, the father who I could have sworn was shane-movies' favorite Jack Nance, an Asian kid, a disturbing little sister. And half of the characters have these weird accents that place them in parts unknown like Superfly Snuka. There's the dark-tinted twists this story takes, the sort of thing you might expect to see in a Roald Dahl story. It seems like it was written by somebody who couldn't make up his mind what he wanted the story to be about. Hair loss and subsequent growth? Ghosts? Kidnapping? Magic? Pubic hair? One of the writers has a name that makes him sound like a Transformer though (Vojtech), so what do you expect? There are several "What the hell?" moments in this. There's a scene that takes place at a soccer game where it's revealed that the main character is wearing a wig. Of course, the game immediately ends and the kids chase the poor boy all the way home while chanting the exact same little jingle that they somehow all know. Which is exactly how the whole thing would play out in real life. Or there's the scene where the art teacher/part-time kidnapper starts painting with his magical brush and has his kidnapping victims suddenly start cheering him on because that makes a lot of sense. Or a scene where the children come up with a clever scheme involving sugar in order to find the location of the missing children, a scene that Jeremy pointed out had a bunch of random homeless people cheering on a little girl on a bicycle. Or there's the whole thing with the Asian kid and his pubic hair. C'mon, Vojtech! What the hell are you trying to pull there? It's a story so strangely told that it takes on an almost surreal quality that I liked and probably would have liked as a kid if some adult--undoubtedly, one that would have been a poor influence--had shown this to me. Jeremy certainly had fond memories of the thing. He has been nominating this for Bad Movie Club for months.
Here's a picture of a kid putting peanut butter on his head because that's something that everybody can appreciate:
The Shit Solution.
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