A Year of Bad Movies # 36 — “Dumpster Baby”
Dumpster Baby (2000)
IMDB Score: 3.9 out of 10
Yes, this movie, from writer/director team James Bickert and Randy Hill, is as bad as its title might suggest.
Truth be told, though, I’m not quite sure what the film was about. Maybe it was the bizarre schizophrenic plot that changed locations and characters every ten minutes or maybe it was because the sound design of the film left the dialogue sounding like it was recorded using two coffee cans and a piece of string but I only have a vague sense of the film’s plot.
The movie, as far as I could tell, had no appearance of the poster's "Garbage Pal Kids" version of a dumpster baby.
It seems that the film follows the misadventures of an abandoned crack baby who is left to die in a dumpster. What follows is a sprawling anthology of morality tales from the perspective of the most well-traveled crack baby ever. As the dumpster darling is passed from hand to hand, audiences are treated to short glimpses of the kindness, cruelty and utter naivety of humanity.
In reality, what this amounts to, is some film school reject’s attempt to create his own version of Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” centered around one of the most taboo subjects he could possibly think of.
To top it off, though, there’s some kind of mysterious Freddy Kruger resurrected serial killer on the loose who may or may not have been the baby’s father. This pale-faced phantom stranger has the ability to glide around the city unseen even though he looks like a leftover from the film “Dark City.” Honestly, I’m not sure what that whole subplot was about and I have no intention of watching the movie again in the hopes of finding out.
I’m as much a fan of edgy independent cinema as the next guy but common — make a little effort! An anthology of human corruption staring an aborted fetus could have been a truly unique and interesting film in the hands of somebody like Todd Solondz. In the hands of producer Lloyd Kauffman, it came off as exploitive and entirely missing of the mark.
While there were a few interesting glimpses at something important the directors had to say, these scenes were lost beneath the shuffle of morbidly obese crack addicts giving birth, naked sexcapades and a scene where the baby was set adrift Moses-style along a river housed only in a beer cooler.
I do have to admit some kind of curiosity about what the heck that whole trench coat vampire subplot was about. With dialogue that was incomprehensible most of the time, I had to guess at what characters were saying and even my best theories leave me stumped about what the ghost character had to do with anything.
Are there any fans of the movie out there that would be kind enough to shed some light on this query?
What am I asking?
I doubt any fans of this movie possess the motor skills to work a doorknob let alone operate a keyboard — the filmmaker’s mothers aside.
Because everybody knows that no matter how crappy your movie is, you’ll always have a fan in your mother. Well, maybe that rule doesn’t apply to a movie about a traveling dumpster baby.
Now let’s close with a big musical number:
