The 80’s seem to be remembered as a time for strange and/or dark kid’s and family movies, with such examples as Gremlins, Return to Oz, The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, The Brave Little Toaster, The Plague Dogs, several Don Bluth movies, and many more being remembered as nightmares to many kids of that era. However, one film truly lives up to the “remembered as a nightmare” quality, namely because most kids only saw it once and couldn’t remember if the movie was even real or not, and that film is The Peanut Butter Solution. I’d heard about this film through conversations about dark kid’s films I had had many years ago, but I never got around to watching it. Well, now I have, and sadly, as an adult, I can’t exactly share in those folks’ experience with this film. What they saw as a disturbing and surreal dream, I just saw as a slow and awkward attempt at a quirky family fantasy movie. However, I do have a thought as to why this film was remembered as “scary” and such, but before we get into that, I’ll give you a rundown of the story.
The film follows Michael, who lives with his father, a struggling artist, and his sister, who has had to take on some of their mom’s responsibilities while she’s away on business. One day, he and his buddy Conrad, or “Connie,” go and check out an abandoned building that was recently destroyed in a fire. When Michael goes in to investigate, he sees something that scares him half to death. The day after that, he wakes up to find that his hair as fallen out, a condition that the doctor refers to as “hairum-scarum,” brought upon by his nasty shock. Michael is distraught by this and refuses to go to school, or even go out in general. His father and sister try to help him by giving him a wig, but this solution doesn’t work for too long as, during a soccer game, another kid rips it off his head. That night, he is visited by the ghosts of two homeless people who died in the fire. Michael had been kind to one of them before, so they decided to return the favor by telling him a recipe for a hair-growth formula. His first attempt at making it is intercepted by his father and sister, who think he was going to drink it. After a second visit by the ghosts, in which one doesn’t want to give him a second chance but the other talks her into it, they give him the recipe on a piece of paper this time, so he can make it as many times as he can. Eventually, he’s able to put the solution together and applies it to his head. Miraculously, when he wakes up the next morning, his hair is back completely. Overjoyed by this, Michael resumes his regular life. However, the solution might have worked a bit too well. You see, the ghosts explicitly told him not to add too much peanut butter to the mixture, but he ended up doing it anyway to try and make it less runny. Now, Michael’s hair is growing way past the point of manageability, to the point where he even has to hold his hair up with a rope pulley just so he can sleep. To make matters worse, the harsh art teacher at his school, who champions realism and denigrates imagination, has become very interested in Michael’s hair, and might have some terrible plans for it. What does the art teacher have in store for Michael? Will Michael ever figure out how to stop his hair from growing? As always, that’s for you to find out, and I’ll try to be careful of spoilers during my discussion. Alright, with that out of the way, let’s talk about this movie.
So, as I was saying before, watching this film as an adult, without having seen it as a kid first, definitely didn’t do it too many favors. Obviously, with kids/family films, you often have to expect a certain amount of exaggeration or suspension of disbelief and such, as the film has to appeal to younger crowds and, depending on the movie, might want to empower the kids watching in some way. Many of the best family films are able to balance the tone between the kids and adults watching so that everyone can enjoy, even with the more exaggerated aspects that would normally turn adults away. However, there are some family films that clearly lean more towards the kid side of things, and might work perfectly fine for them, but don’t hold up in the eyes of an adult. For example, when you watch Home Alone as a kid, you’re sucked into the scenario of a kid fending for himself and fighting off very incompetent robbers, but if you watch it again as an adult, you’re probably going to see the contrived writing more than anything else (especially how every single thing had to line up just right for the kid to be in the situation he’s in so that the story can work). I think the Peanut Butter Solution falls more into the latter category than anything, but to be honest, I’m not even sure it’s the most well-done example of that sort of movie. At least in the case of Home Alone, the acting, pacing, and general presentation still work for the story that they’re telling, even without much appeal for adults. The Peanut Butter Solution, on the other hand, just comes across as more awkward than anything else, almost like a bad After School Special more than a theatrical film. The kids in the movie talk more like adults, but not even in that charming Fred Savage-esque way, more like the writers just didn’t quite know how to write for kid characters. With the sister, it sort of makes sense, since she has to take on a semi-parental role while the mom’s away but considering that Michael and Conrad also have this sort of issue to varying degrees, it just comes across as either a writing or direction problem (or both). In addition to this, the film has a rather slow and subdued pace/presentation, even with the more exaggerated elements. At first, I thought this might be interesting, as it’s easy for kids’ films to get too hyper or overplayed, especially as time has gone on. However, I slowly realized that this sort of pacing didn’t seem so much like a creative choice, but more like a result of limitations. Less like Tarkovsky, where it’s an intentional element of the experience, and more like a low-budget film, where it feels like they just didn’t quite have the resources to pull off what they wanted to (or even that they didn’t quite know what they wanted to do with it). To add to that, the plot is kind of all over the place. It’s not exactly random, and the elements are all presented and technically come together into one story, but it still comes across like it wasn’t quite thought out. We have a kid getting scared by something he saw in an abandoned building to the point where his hair falls out, so he falls into a depressive state where he doesn’t want to go outside and even the things he tries to alleviate the issue don’t work, so the ghosts of two homeless people he helped out one time give him a formula to regrow his hair but warn him not to use too much peanut butter, but he ends up using too much peanut butter anyway which causes his hair to grow infinitely and become a nuisance, and then his crotchety art teacher end up kidnapping him, along with several other kids, to use his hair for his own purposes, and the hair turns out to have properties beyond what you’d expect. When you look at it from the outside, it seems like the plot would work fine for a weird kids’ movie, but the awkward pace and the not quite setup nature of certain plot elements make it seem like something got missed in the writing phase or something. There do seem to be certain themes that the film is trying to touch upon, such as how imagination isn’t often valued (such as with the father not being able to sell his more creative works over ones that depict more standard imagery and the art teacher trying to enforce a strict teaching of realism in his class with no room for experimenting) and possibly a reflection of puberty anxiety (what with Michael’s hair growing out of control and his buddy Conrad literally applying the formula to his “down there” region, which results in the hair growing down and out of his pant legs), but again, it doesn’t feel like these ideas amount to too much in the end, since the story doesn’t come across as well-constructed. So, overall, it would seem that this is just a not-so-well-made kids’ movie that most people probably only saw once. There’s not much here that jumps out as being really dark or frightening, so it might be hard to see why folks would talk about it in that light. However, I believe that the poor and awkward presentation/creation, coupled with only seeing it once, is exactly why this film stuck in so many kids’ heads. The strange vibe almost makes it come across like an odd dream or something like that, and the weird premise would only make it seem even more so (making you question if anyone would actually make a film like this). Given enough distance over the years and the lack of major distribution, the memory would start to become fuzzy, and it would enter a corner of your mind that is wracked with understanding if what you saw actually happened or not. In that way, I find this film interesting, since it was able to create this sort of ethereal memory experience for so many people. It’s kind of cool that these folks have something like this that they can share between them, almost comforting in a way, especially considering how many false memories people can have that are solely conceived by them and them alone.
Therefore, I think the Peanut Butter Solution is best viewed as, while not a great film in its own right, at least an interesting artifact that affected so many people. If you saw this film as a kid, then it’s worth revisiting, if only for you to be able to join the shared experience I described earlier. If you’re only watching this now as an adult, then I think you’re more likely to get some enjoyment from just how odd it is, more than anything else. Plus, early career Celine Dion songs, so…that’s something. Anyway, it was neat to finally see this film, and especially to learn about how it was for so many kids of that era, but I personally think seeing it once was enough for me. So, try out the Peanut Butter Solution, it can work wonders in its own way, but don’t overdo it, or it could turn into a nightmare for you (but hey, at least you’ll have company).