The 1985 "Children's" Film Peanut Butter Solution Is Some Seriously Fucked Up Shit
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
In the previous entry of this column, on the gloriously bonkers 1983 Canadian animated rock and roll dystopian science fiction mind-fuck Rock & Rule, I wrote, “One of the great joys of this column is getting paid to experience freaky-ass shit I might never have watched if I were not professionally obligated to do so. Now I like to think I have seen a LOT of freaky shit in the forty three years I have been alive. It’s kind of my thing. Let others waste time with quality and prestige: I’m all about shit that is crazy, shit that is bad, and shit that is so crazy-bad that it’s actually mind-blowingly awesome.”
In broadcasting my love of freaky-ass shit I was subtly and not so subtly sending a message out to the universe that I really fucking love being introduced to mind-meltingly weird new cult artifacts and am looking for any excuse to get weird.
The universe responded in a big way with two consecutive Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledges for the same movie. In the year and a half this column has been around, that has NEVER happened before and this is the 78th entry.
What are y’all willing to pay good money for me to see. Joker? The Irishman? Something ubiquitous and wildly controversial? Nope. Multiple patrons paid one hundred dollars for me to watch and then write about The Peanut Butter Solution.
That is surprising, in that The Peanut Butter Solution is so obscure that even a dedicated student of the bizarre and random like myself was only vaguely familiar with it before I received the back-to-back pledges for it. Yet it’s also completely on brand for this column and this website.
I was put on earth to write about stuff like The Peanut Butter Solution, which falls into one of my favorite cinematic subgenres: children’s movies that are way too bleak and morbid to be suitable for kids.
The Peanut Butter Solution was pitched to me as a waking fever dream that traumatized generations of unsuspecting kids with its hypnotic, David Lynchian, utterly unique combination of pubic hair explosions, dead hobo ghosts, child slavery, nightmarish imagery redolent of the Holocaust and fatal illness, wino death houses, fatal fires and the first-ever releases of a teenage wunderkind with a magical voice the world would come to know and revere as Celine Dion.
Like Rock & Rule before it The Peanut Butter Solution lived up to the hype and then some.
A tone of wildly wrong and wonderfully right morbidity is established right off the bat when wonderfully perverse comedy kid sidekick Connie (Siluck Saysanasy, of Degrassi Junior High) stomps over to his buddy Michael’s (Matthew Mackay) house to munch on some delicious grapes and cheerfully recount watching a fatal fire at the neighborhood hobo house whose wanton destruction had him in a state of pure, delirious ecstasy.
Connie happily describes the deadly blaze with a combination of utter ghoulishness and preciously sexual glee. He talks about “wiggling through the fireman’s legs” and hoses spraying all around and does a bad-taste impression of a victim of the fire choking and gagging as they died.
“Boy those flames! You should have seen them!” Connie says cheerfully in a way that suggests that the sight of charred hobo corpses could only add to the wonder of the moment.
Why are the kids here so attuned to the comings and goings of winos and hobos? What kind of complex and mutually parasitic relationship do they have and why don’t parents and the authorities seem to know anything about it?
Next Connie and Michael decide to make an innocent visit to the burnt-up hobo death house. When Mike goes in for a closer look he spies some manner of unthinkable Lovecraftian horror that causes his hair to fall off in fright, a condition a doctor of perhaps dubious legitimacy claims is medically known as “Hare em Scare Em”, something I doubt highly.
Movies and television shows have conditioned us to see baldness in children in a bleak, almost invariably tragic light. It is synonymous with children dying of cancer or other fatal illnesses, with chemotherapy and the Holocaust.
So when Mike goes from having a healthy head of hair to being completely hairless and weeps uncontrollably over his misfortune, the historical connotations make his hairlessness seem even more nightmarish and grim.
Then Michael is visited in his sleep by a pair of dead hobo ghosts, a man who speaks bleakly of a hard, wasted life ruled and destroyed by his uncontrollable, ultimately fatal lust for alcohol and a witchy woman who treats the freaked out little boy with the cruelty and callousness that defines the adult world in The Peanut Butter Solution.
This woman peppers Michael with insults, telling him he’s not very bright but Karma smiles upon him, after a fashion, because he once gave all the money he had to a homeless person, which seems very generous except that he’s eleven years old, so it was probably in the two to three dollar range.
That nevertheless is apparently enough to get him in good with the spirit world. The hobo ghosts give Mike a recipe that will magically grow back his hair, namely the titular concoction. It’s known as the peanut butter solution both because peanut butter is the key ingredient that keeps everything together and also because Skippy peanut butter had the dubious judgment to finagle product placement in one of the weirdest, trippiest Canadian kids movies of all time.
When he sees that the Peanut Butter solution works wonder, and creates a magnificent nest of hair where once Michael was bald as a newborn baby’s bottom, Connie gets an idea. Connie decides to use a little Peanut Butter solution on his bathing suit area because being a pervy little weirdo, Connie REALLY wants pubic hair. Lots and lots and lots of pubic hair. A thick, dense forest of pubic hair.
And for some fucking reason whatever adult was in charge of putting this thing into production didn’t put their foot down and insist that there was absolutely no way there was going to be a pubic hair subplot in a film about eleven year olds aimed at small children.
I love that Skippy apparently paid good money and was invested, financially and otherwise, in its wholesome product being forever associated with homemade ghost-witch recipes for regrowing hair on your head and/or the most luxurious, long, quickly growing pubic hair in human history.
Michael unfortunately suffers from Thinner Syndrome. Like the protagonist of Thinner, what first appears to be an obscene blessing—not only growing back hair, but growing back hair in great abundance and lusciousness—quickly turns nightmarish when Michael’s hair doesn’t just grow back: it never stops growing.
Soon Michael has a Rapunzel-level mane of hair that keeps growing constantly and at freakish, never before seen levels. In keeping with The Peanut Butter Solution’s wonderfully grim take on grown-ups, Mike and Connie’s teachers think they’re growing hair on their head, and hair on their genital region, at a magical speed and a magical; amount just to be assholes, just to fuck with them and make their already hard lives and shitty jobs even harder and shittier.
No less than three teachers threaten to quit unless these cursed, bizarrely hairy weirdoes are kicked out of school for, uh, excessive hair growth? Is that really something to expel children over?
Fucking adults, man. Who can possibly understand their weird ways and unfathomable motivations?
The Peanut Butter Solution shares with the work of Roald Dahl a transgressive sense that the adult world is unfathomably perverse and evil and that adults are sinister figures you need to protect yourself from, not kind, gentle souls who will protect you from harm.
The main adult Michael and Connie and the children of their small town need to protect themselves from is The Signor (Michel Maillot), a demented villain, con artist, imposter, child slave-master and avowed enemy of imagination who toils as an art teacher in Michael and Connie’s school.
Early in The Peanut Butter Solution the principal calls The Signor into her office and tells him what is already achingly apparent from his first moment on screen: this dude is seriously bad news.
Ah, but he’s no garden variety loonball. No, The Signor is something special, a kid’s film Frank Booth we learn has been punted from several schools, has adopted no less than four new names and appearances and, for good measure, facetiously claims to be a descendent of Rembrandt.
The Signor gets fired. Then he really turns to the dark side. He kidnaps Mike and 20 other children and creates a factory that creates magic hairbrushes made out of Mike’s ever-growing mane of rich, thick, lustrous hair.
It’s like a Canuck version of the Dr. Seuss-written cult classic The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, which similarly feels like a waking nightmare you never want to end.
The Peanut Butter Solution starts out weird and just gets weirder. The Signor is a detestable villain but when Connie, sly, brilliant Connie tells him that his father died in a plane crash and he now wants The Signor to be his new dad the crazy, imagination-hating child slavery proponent becomes a new man.
The Signor bizarrely but poignantly embraces being Connie’s new dad and advocate but it’s all a hoax to trick the child-hating lunatic into entering a magical painting so that he can experience “The Fright” himself, something that similarly causes his hair to instantly fall out.
From the first frame to the last The Peanut Butter Solution is an acid trip of a kid’s movie that’s way too weird and wild and dark for children, and perfect for them at the same time.
The Peanut Butter Solution was released as the second entry in a book and film series called “Tales for All.” The warped genius of The Peanut Butter Solution is that it most assuredly is NOT a movie for everyone, but rather special, special people like the readers and writer and particularly the patrons of this website.
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