by Alex Rudolph Staff Writer

The DCOM Pantheon #6: Can of Worms (dir. Kathy Mackel, April 10, 1999)

Part of a suburban childhood is not having a treehouse but occasionally seeing them rise above other people's fences whenever you walk around the neighborhood. Sometimes the other family's treehouse is a flat wooden platform in a tree, sometimes it's a prefab plastic house, sometimes it's a classic 50s sitcom treehouse. I always wanted to see inside one. As a kid, you wonder what other people's houses look like. You get invited over and realize their TV is in a totally different room than you'd have expected, you find out your friend has both a Super Nintendo and a Genesis and, somehow, a NeoGeo. You're (I'm) sharing a room with your (my) sister and having a computer in your room seems like the height of decadence. And when you finally do go to a birthday party at a rich kid's house and see their tree fort up close, they say "Don't go in there, it's covered in spiders" (this was the case with our Fisher-Price playhouse). Disney movies create unrealistic expectations about love. They mess up your ideas about gender. And they make you think treehouses are rad.

Can of Worms is a film in which a boy with a treehouse makes the same mental miscalculation about meeting aliens that I had about building my own Swiss Family Robinson set-up in my backyard.

Mike, said boy, doesn't get along with people at school. He has friends and a popular girl may like him, but one bully on the football team inexplicably hates him, so Mike's miserable. The lone bully makes his life such a hell that he creates a story about peaceful aliens wiped out by a tyrannical warmonger race (yikes) that traveled from planet to planet, plundering and murdering. In his story, Mike's the peaceful aliens' Superman; they put their last living baby on a ship to Earth and then that baby grew up to save the world. No, sorry, that baby grew up to dissociate and convince himself of his own fairytale, like one of the kids who played Dungeons and Dragons as a gateway to roaming real sewers with a sword. Mike is the tween everybody was worried about during the Satanic Panic.

On the same day head cheerleader Katelyn Sandman joins one of Mike's classes and chooses to sit next to him, the football bully decides to really make our hero's life hell. He does what all jocks do to nerds: He uses a floppy disk to hack into an Excel doc on Mike's computer and makes the screen display a clipart trash can and some Kid Pix-style text.

Mike responds by hacking into everybody's computers and playing an animation of the bully's face on a pig rolling in mud. You'll remember that Zenon also had a virus that manifested as an animated animal with a main character's face. This is what happened with computers in the 90s. Today, you've got QAnon and Twitter racists, but please don't forget how scary the 90s were.

Katelyn is so impressed with Mike's creativity that she asks for his help decorating the gym for a Halloween dance. He goes all out. Katelyn's impressed and tells Mike she's heard he tells great stories and asks if he'd tell her one. She says it in a softly flirty way, like "tell me about what we'd do if you took me on a date," and Mike takes this as his cue to tell her about the spaceship he used to travel to Earth. Undeterred, Katelyn asks Mike out. Mike sauters together a cummerbund that looks like a suicide vest.

The bully ruins the dance and a defeated Mike uses a homemade satellite dish to beg aliens to take him away from a world that doesn't understand smart people. I'm not kidding when I say this sequence is shot like a horror film. Specifically, it looks like Fire in the Sky.

This is actually how the movie began. Can of Worms opens with the satellite sequence, flashes back to the vicious Kid Pix bully and then, halfway through the film's running time, returns to the moment of contact.

Like a decompressed Halloweentown, Can of Worms takes a long time to get to its hook, but once we get there, it begins throwing ideas out quickly. Aliens have received Mike's signal, but it turns out most of them are hucksters. They want to hitch their wagons to Mike's star as he becomes an intergalactic celebrity. For the next half hour, we meet at least one alien per scene.

First, there's Barnabus, a dog with a translating device. He's the Jacob Marley who foretells the coming of the spirits, warning Mike not to trust anybody else who appears. Aliens have always known about Earth, but our planet was considered too primitive to interfere with. Now that Mike's made interstellar contact, he's unwittingly signaled Earth's advancement. It's a free-for-all, and the aliens are anxious to explore.

The first shifty alien we meet is by far the worst. He's The Bom, a sheep face on a diseased, mucus-covered bladder.

He looks bad enough, and then he opens his mouth. The Bom has human teeth.

At least we don't have to see him eat anything. That would probably be too much to

Ah, well. The Bom eats a hamburger and then burps and farts. After a beat, he poops popcorn. Something about the lack of a skeleton makes The Bom hard to look at. A puppet like Kermit the Frog will fold his face up to convey certain emotions, but there's a consistency to his head shape. The Bom, though, crumples in on himself and it's fucking gross.

Next, we meet The Loafer Alien, a yellow thing with stalk eyes and human feet, which are even more disgusting than the human teeth he, too, has jutting out of his goopy head. He wants to be Mike's agent and help adapt his life into a TV series.

We accelerate further, with a half dozen aliens showing up in Mike's treehouse. They're colorful, all at least a little disgusting. One has two faces and wants Mike to endorse his products. One is a floating fish head that wants to date Mike.

They're ambulance chasers, but they're mostly just here to fill time. The big bad alien, The Thoad, is an initially human-looking monster who reveals himself to be a giant frog in classic back-of-shirt-ripping fashion.

The Thoad kidnaps two kids, one of whom is Mike's friend, the other the football bully, and places them in a zoo/prison designed to look like Mike's backyard. It's probably a Slaughterhouse Five reference, but I read Slaughterhouse Five in high school, when I was ready for it. At 10, this scared the hell out of me.

The Thoad tries to calm a frightened Mike down, saying the two humans in the zoo will be treated well and their lives will be "infinitely longer here than they would be on dangerous old Earth." They'll live forever, alone, in a cage the size of a suburban backyard. Can of Worms is pro-prison abolition then, which is pretty cool.

I'm going to describe everything that happens with the speed at which it happens.

The kids free the prisoners and fight off The Thoad, they get back to Earth and Barnabus calls the alien police, but all their lines are busy, the police come anyway and that's the end. Barnabus visits every once in a while.

Introducing an alien police number Barnabus could have called at any time is a hilarious deus ex machina that gets equally hilarious when the movie shuts it down with a voicemail message five seconds later. And then the police come. The last 20 minutes of Can of Worms is as dark as anything Disney's put out, at least under the Disney brand name and not Buena Vista or Miramax. I loved it.

Side-note: like Zenon, Can of Worms was based on a then-new middle reader series. Look at how beautifully 90s these book covers are.

[insert book cover, eggs 1, eggs 2 and horse]

Let me get these tattooed on my chest.

Cetus-Lupeedus Count: 0. This movie is worthless!

Before they were big Star Michael Shulman (Mike) had already played Francis the Hustler Kid on Recess by 1999, which is a big deal to me, an idiot. More importantly, he's spent his adulthood as a hugely successful figure in the theater world. He produced a play with Greatest Living Actor Michael Shannon in 2010 and won the Tony for Best Play in 2019 for his work on The Ferryman.

Shulman's co-star Erika Christensen (Katelyn) was in Traffic the next year (she played Michael Douglas' addict daughter) and was one of the main characters on the popular sitcom Parenthood, which is one of those things I've never seen but always shows up on streaming services' "recommended" tabs.

Well after they were big: Mark Mothersbaugh composed Can of Worms' score, as he had for Halloweentown. How's this for a bizarre five-movie consecutive run: Rushmore, Halloweentown, The Rugrats Movie, 200 Cigarettes, Can of Worms. Just five of the ten features Booji Boy scored between 1998 and 1999.

The similarly prolific Malcolm McDowell voices main alien Barnabus. Other alien voices include Theodore Rex's "face performer," and people who played characters like Captain Planet, Powerpuff Girls' Bubbles and latter-day Jon Arbuckle.

Adam Wylie (Nick), the third kid, might work more than either of those guys. He was one of the sons on Picket Fences, which is why he's here and not in the "before they were big" section, but he's since voiced characters in everything from Hey Arnold to last month's The Mitchells vs. The Machines. The thing I'm easily most interested in, though, was his starring role in 2009's Porky's Pimpin' Pee Wee, in which Wylie played Pee Wee. Around that time, Howard Stern was trying to launch a remake of the 80s sex comedy Porky's, a franchise everybody my age has heard about but nobody's bothered to see. The Porky's rights were a tangled mess and the holding company who had the sturdiest claim to them could only keep that claim if they made a movie by 2009. To make sure the gilded Porky's license wasn't sold to Stern, the holding company got the guy who directed BMX Bandits to crank out Porky's Pimpin' Pee Wee for a song. It was released on demand for the legally-required minimum amount of time necessary to be considered a home release, pulled and never released on DVD. It's apparently streaming on Tubi now, but it's safe to say that, like Roger Corman's Fantastic Four or the infomercial Wheel of Time pilot with Billy Zane, it's more fun to think about an extremely petty producer making the most basic Porky's movie he can to spite other people than it is to actually watch that movie. If you told me the people at the holding company that commissioned the sublimely titled Porky's Pimpin' Pee Wee had never watched the film, I would believe you.

What I had remembered from childhood: The Bom. I know I liked Can of Worms, but I don't think I saw it more than once or twice. The Bom was the only alien still distinct in my mind. I also remembered the alien zoo, which, based on how prevalent it was in my memories, I had assumed would have lasted longer than ten minutes.

The year is 1999: Dad checks his AT&T stocks with an extremely 1999 graphic. There are a lot of great posters and computer things. An email account says "You have mail" in a woman's voice, which I guess is far away enough from "You've got mail" in a man's voice to avoid legal action.

Wouldn't fly today!: Mike mentions getting freaked out watching Sleepaway Camp, a slasher movie with an iconically gonzo final shot. Now that kids can look up any references the second after they hear them, I don't think Disney would include a nod to something so famously fucked up. The third Google image search result for "sleepaway camp" includes part of that final shot.

The _____ was in your heart the whole time: farting, shitting alien sent to take you away from a world you just can't understand

Ultimate Ranking:

Brink!
Halloweentown
Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century
Under Wraps
Can of Worms
You Lucky Dog

Ultimate Ranking Notes: I love weird puppets. These are too weird. And Can of Worms would have bumped up a spot or two if it had stayed a horror movie longer. Once it gets intense, you wish it had always been that way.

Next Time: The Thirteenth Year, the movie where a kid turns into a mermaid