Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy Made $2.6 Million and Predicted the Whole Pharmacy Aisle
The 1996 Kids in the Hall movie cost $8 million, got a 42% from critics and lost to Bio-Dome for worst comedy. It's the smartest dumb movie about happy pills ever made.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
In April 1996, Paramount released Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, produced by Lorne Michaels, starring the five Canadian men who had spent five seasons on TV dressing as women and crushing people's heads with their fingers. It cost about $8 million and made about $2.6 million. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 42%. Gene Siskel liked it and Roger Ebert didn't, which is the film-critic equivalent of your parents fighting in the car.
It also got nominated at the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for most painfully unfunny comedy and lost to Bio-Dome. Losing a worst-comedy award to Pauly Shore is a special kind of failure. It's like being told you're not even the worst dancer at the wedding, the worst dancer is the man who's on fire.
Here's the plot, and it's better than you'd guess. A nervous scientist at a drug company, played by Kevin McDonald, invents a pill called Gleemonex that cures depression by locking you inside your happiest memory. The company, run by Mark McKinney doing a fruity, unhurried voice the troupe has said was based on his Lorne Michaels impression, rushes it to market. The scientist becomes a celebrity. Then the patients start going into comas, smiling.
Thirty years on, that isn't a sketch. That's a quarterly earnings call. A drug company sells happiness, the ads are cheerful, the side effects are in a voice that talks very fast, and the founder goes on talk shows. Brain Candy got there before the iPhone, before the influencer and before every third commercial on network television started with a woman laughing alone at a salad.
The production was a mess, and the troupe has said so. Dave Foley had already left for NewsRadio and, by most accounts, was in the movie only because a contract said he had to be, so he plays fewer parts than the others. Paramount wanted Bruce McCulloch's Cancer Boy, a relentlessly cheerful sick kid, cut from the film. The Kids refused. The studio, by the troupe's own later account, got sour and didn't sell the thing. You can't really blame a studio for not wanting to put Cancer Boy on a lunchbox, but you can blame it for not noticing he's the movie's thesis: a culture so desperate to feel good it'll applaud anything.
The jokes that land, land hard, none harder than Scott Thompson's closeted family man, who takes the pill and comes out in a full-blown musical number. It's not a tidy film. It's a bunch of sketches stuck to a story with gum. But the gum is made of the sharpest idea any SNL-adjacent movie had in the '90s, and most of the others were about a guy who could only talk to a car.
The 2022 Prime Video revival even opened by treating the movie as a curse, which is a group of men knowing exactly how bad their reviews were and making it a bit. That's the right attitude. Brain Candy failed because it told the truth early, and in America the truth only gets a hit if somebody remakes it with a bigger star. A prophet is never welcome in his own multiplex; he has to wait for the streaming rights.