Unhinged 80s Fantasy Turns A Hair-Growth Disaster Into Nightmare Fuel
Has this ever happened to you? You get spooked at a haunted house, and then you go bald. Suddenly, and without explanation, the ghosts that scared the very hair off of you haunt your dreams, giving you the recipe for hair growth, but in a Monkey’s Paw kind of fashion. Before you know it, your hair is being harvested to make magical paintbrushes, dozens of kids are held captive to produce said paintbrushes, and you’re reluctantly caught in the middle of it because you decided to stream 1985’s The Peanut Butter Solution on Tubi.
The above paragraph succinctly explains everything that happens in The Peanut Butter Solution, though we’re never given a precise reason why this chain of events occurs. Half the fun is trying to figure it out. The other half comes from realizing that nobody really thought this one through, and we’re kind of stuck watching this one together.
Not Your Mom’s Usual Recipe
There are movies that are difficult to summarize, and then there’s 1985’s The Peanut Butter Solution, a Canadian children’s movie about a kid named Michael (Mathew Mackay), who gets so frightened by a couple of ghosts that all of his hair falls out. That’s unfortunate, but luckily the ghosts later visit him in a dream and give him a recipe for a magical hair-growth formula involving peanut butter. He screws up the recipe, uses too much peanut butter, and suddenly his hair starts growing at an absolutely uncontrollable rate. His friend Connie (Siluck Saysanasy) also decides to try the solution somewhere considerably farther south, which is acknowledged just long enough to make you wonder what the hell kind of movie you’re watching.
Things get considerably weirder when Michael’s creepy art teacher, simply known as The Signor, kidnaps him along with a bunch of other children and puts them to work making magical paintbrushes using Michael’s constantly growing hair. The brushes can paint pictures that become real enough to physically enter, because the haunted house, spontaneous baldness, and supernatural peanut butter weren’t enough material for one children’s movie. The Peanut Butter Solution plays all of this remarkably straight, which only makes the experience more surreal. It feels like somebody filmed a nightmare a kid tried explaining over breakfast and somehow got the entire thing released in theaters.
Does Charlie Brown Know About This?
The Peanut Butter Solution plays like the first Harry Potter film in the sense that its protagonist is both blessed and cursed by his gift, except his gift is that he suddenly has too much hair to handle. That’s the entire story that’s trying to be told here, so if you ignore the rest of Harry Potter lore, you’ll probably be fine here.
What is especially amusing about The Peanut Butter Solution, however, is how many jump cuts are involved in painting this picture. As we progress through each scene, Michael goes from rocking a bald cap to a full mane of Fabio-esque hair, while everybody around him finds themselves just as perplexed as the protagonist himself. There is no rhyme or reason here; his hair simply grows really, really fast.
That’s the entire movie, and that’s the only joke being told here: a boy goes bald after getting spooked, and then he grows a lot of hair. This isn’t exactly the kind of heavy subject matter you’ll find in films like Beyond the Black Rainbow, but the existential angst felt by its protagonist remains similarly tantalizing because, in his mind, this is all just a terrible thing to happen to somebody who’s barely had a moment to figure out what life is all about.
As of this writing, you can stream The Peanut Butter Solution for free on Tubi.
THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION SCORE
