Today’s National Cheeseburger Day… So… Here’s a review for Good Burger. Why not?

We all have a handful of films that are complete and utter garbage that we love, right? No? Well, I do anyway, and I know that so-bad-it’s-good cinephiles do exist aside from myself. One of my top picks for my list of this nature is the Nickelodeon disaster Good Burger, which is simply ridiculous in every sense of the word. The All That skit with Kel Mitchell as a cashier of a fast food joint was popular enough to be turned into a full on feature film, I suppose. This was around the time in the ‘90s when Nickelodeon was hoping to dominate the family feature market with Nickelodeon Movies (remember those orange VHS tapes?), and expanding on a successful formula seemed like one of the best places to start. Well, Good Burger sucks, but it’s actually incredible in how bad it is. I don’t even consider it a guilty pleasure. I love Good Burger, and don’t let the low rating fool you. Subjectively, it’s atrocious, but it is hilarious deep down in my heart. I have zero nostalgic connection to this film too; I only discovered it as a late teenager in the 2000’s over ten years after it came out.

So, why is this film even worthwhile? Well, it does have an interesting approach to have both Kel and Kenan (who, I don’t believe, was a part of the original Good Burger sketches) partner up in this film. There’s some slop about loneliness, and how Kenan (I’m not going to refer to the character names, just to be clear) was abandoned by his father (we never really hear about this outside of one or two scenes, by the way), and Kel is misunderstood and really just wants to be a good friend. There’s the rival restaurant across the street called Mondo Burger, which represents the evils of major corporations that treat their workers like slaves and their consumers like cattle (with those huge patties to boot). I mean, there is a story here. However, that’s not what I care about. No. It’s the endless stream of garbage jokes — particularly from Kel’s character, Ed — that are so bad (just so bad) that they are anti-humour perfection. In a skit, it is more tolerable to put up with these kinds of on-the-nose, cringe worthy jokes. In a feature film, this amount of stupidity is borderline torturous, and I love it. Even when the jokes are just fully terrible, I laugh anyway given the scenario of me watching this film for the umpteenth time knowing it’s awful. This film exists, and I can’t stop disbelieving that it does.

Captions can’t help figure this film out, even twenty three years later.

Good Burger even gets grossly insensitive, with poor Abe Vigoda being the brunt end of ageist jokes, Kenan and Kel taking part in that ‘90s obsession with men-dressing-up-as-women (that hasn’t aged remotely well in most instances), and even asylum patients (who take part in a dance number, because Nickelodeon has no moral compass). The film loses sight of its family demographic with moments like Vigoda’s character needing a hospital because he seemingly “broke [his] ass” (a line that’s so out of place that it’s a favourite of mine). It fails on so many fronts outside of being a safe space for idiocy, and maybe that’s why it’s, well, so likeable despite how much it hurts my head. Good Burger feels like the happy medium of garbage ‘90s family films that excels past The Big Green or A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (coincidentally Disney films, but it was an accident, I swear). It’s self aware in its iniquities. When Kel remarks that thirteen dollars is “almost fourteen dollars” with extreme enthusiasm, you know the writers agreed that this is a painfully stupid line. That’s why I love this film. Granted, I can’t pretend it’s actually good, but I can admit that I find much schadenfreude related joy in this abomination of a film driven by sugar-coated agony.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.