I hesitate to describe The Peanut Butter Solution (1985) because anything I could say about it would only enhance its strangeness. Now, I am the kind of person who enjoys the bizarre. In a culture that is increasingly either atheist or radically traditional, being Catholic almost feels countercultural. This film is beyond the pale. I will give you a brief synopsis and go into more detail in the next paragraph: a boy has all his hair scared out of him by a pair of ghosts in a house destroyed by fire, those same ghosts give him a solution that makes it so that his scalp cannot stop growing hair, and he is then kidnapped by his embittered former art teacher in order to make paintbrushes. If any of this seems outlandish to you, be prepared for so much more.

The strangeness of The Peanut Butter Solution begins with eleven-year-old Michael Baskin (Mathew Mackay), who lives with his father, Billy (Michael Hogan), and older sister, Suzie (Alison Darcy), while his mother (Anna Vitre) is away in Australia dealing with family matters. Michael and his best friend, Connie (Siluck Saysanasy), learn that an abandoned mansion has burned down, killing homeless people who had been sheltering inside. The boys visit the ruins, where Connie dares Michael to investigate. Michael climbs inside, sees something terrifying, screams, and falls from an upper window. He survives without serious injury but cannot remember what frightened him. The next morning, he awakens completely bald. A doctor diagnoses the mysterious condition as “The Fright,” apparently accepting that a sufficiently powerful scare can make every hair on a child’s head disappear overnight. Michael’s family buys him a wig, but schoolmates discover it during a soccer game and mock him. His misery is compounded by the Signor (Michel Maillot), the school’s unpleasant art teacher, who discourages imagination and demands that his students copy what he wants rather than create for themselves. The Signor is eventually fired after complaints about his behavior. In the midst of his angst, Michael is visited by two ghosts, the homeless people who died in the mansion. They are grateful because Michael had previously shown kindness to people like them, so they give him a recipe guaranteed to restore his hair. The ingredients include strange but ordinary household items and, most importantly, peanut butter. They specifically warn Michael not to use too much of it. Naturally, he does. After rubbing the concoction onto his scalp, Michael discovers that his hair has returned, but it does not understand when enough is enough. It grows continuously and at an astonishing rate. Connie demands to know Michael’s secret and, hoping to make himself appear more mature, applies some of the solution to his pubic area. This works much better than he intended, giving the film another problem that most children’s movies have somehow managed to avoid. Michael’s ever-lengthening hair becomes impossible to conceal and increasingly disruptive at school. Eventually, both boys are suspended. Connie discovers that shouting at the magically growing hair can temporarily stop it, which is somehow one of the more sensible developments in the story. The Signor, meanwhile, discovers that Michael’s hair possesses another remarkable property. When used to make paintbrushes, it allows an artist to paint whatever comes to mind with extraordinary realism, and the resulting pictures can even become places that people can enter. Seeing an opportunity, the Signor abducts Michael after drugging him and imprisons him in a hidden factory. He then kidnaps numerous other neighborhood children, including Connie’s younger sister, and forces them to manufacture hundreds of brushes from Michael’s endlessly growing hair. The children work under threats of going without food while the Signor sells the miraculous brushes. Michael’s disappearance devastates Billy, while Suzie and Connie begin investigating. A newly purchased paintbrush provides the crucial clue when they realize its bristles are Michael’s hair and trace its origin to the Signor. Connie hides in the Signor’s vehicle and pours sugar behind it to leave Suzie a trail, but a street sweeper inconveniently erases much of their evidence. Connie nevertheless reaches the factory and discovers Michael and the kidnapped children. His first rescue attempt fails, and the Signor captures him. Connie then changes tactics. Pretending that he admires the Signor and wishes the former teacher could be a father to him, Connie persuades him to create a special painting. He asks for a picture of the burned mansion and challenges the Signor to enter it and discover what frightened Michael. The Signor steps through the magical painting into the ruins, where he encounters the same two ghosts. He emerges terrified and completely bald, having acquired The Fright himself. Michael then enters the painted mansion and faces the ghosts for a final time. He is no longer afraid, and the curse passes from him. His hair finally stops its relentless growth. The furious Signor pursues the children through the factory as they attempt to escape. Suzie, having finally located the hideout, brings Billy and the authorities to the scene. Billy arrives armed, the police close in, and the Signor is arrested while Michael, Connie, and the other children are freed. Michael returns home with his family just as his mother comes back from Australia, restoring a degree of normalcy that the movie abandoned at the moment the opening credits began to roll.

The Peanut Butter Solution ends with Michael’s hair under control, the children safe, and the villain defeated. It also leaves the audience to contemplate a story in which ghosts, peanut butter, uncontrollable body hair, child slavery, magical paintings, and an evil art teacher somehow belong to the same narrative universe. Your guess as to how anyone pitched this movie is as good as mine. Indeed, it does not leave much for a reviewer to say, Catholic or otherwise, other than to comment further on its oddity. For much of the first fifteen minutes of its runtime, I could not figure out the point of what I was watching. In that opening sequence, though, is a moment that, according to Michael, “changed his life.” At first, I thought it had been something that he witnessed on the way to school on the first day we meet him. Only by watching further do we learn that it was a flashback in which he gives money to the homeless. This, in and of itself, is not exclusively a Christian act. After all, plenty of people of other religions, or no religion, help those in need. What struck me is when Michael says that he gave all he had. This has a Biblical echo in Mark 12:41-44 and Luke 21:1-4. In those passages, Jesus observes people making contributions to the Temple treasury. Many give out of their surplus, but a poor widow gives two small coins. Turning to His disciples, Jesus remarks that she has given more than all the others because she gave out of her poverty, offering all she had to live on. Catholicism teaches that salvation is a gift of God’s grace that we receive in faith and live out through charity and good works. We do not earn Heaven by accumulating enough good deeds, but our actions matter because living faith necessarily bears fruit in love. That might not have been something Michael was dealing with, but his good deed is eventually rewarded when he confronts the ghosts for the last time and they remove The Fright. Within the strange moral universe of the movie, it is one more reminder about the benefits of being good for goodness’ sake.

And for goodness’ sake, do not watch The Peanut Butter Solution. The people who should view it are the folks from Mystery Science Theater 3000. I spent much of the movie thinking of jokes at its expense, which may not have been the most charitable thing I could have done. In my defense, the movie gave me an extraordinary amount of material.