The Peanut Butter Solution (1985) Made Me Really Wonder About Canada

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by Patrick Anderson, one of my partners in crime over at ModernHorrors.com and one of the most passionate champions of low-budget indie films I’ve ever known. He’s also a lawyer, so if you’re disturbed or unsettled by this movie, you should sue him. Or you could just listen to his podcast, Not Suitable For Anyone, which sometimes features my voice! Wow. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

Have you ever been to Canada? I have, but it’s been a long time. I went to Toronto one summer with my church’s youth choir, and I’m sure we did some interesting things, but all I remember is attending a Blue Jays game and throwing pennies at strangers at Niagara Falls. (I was a little troublemaker.)

But as I watched The Peanut Butter Solution, I felt as if I’d been transported to Canada once again. But not to any of the nifty tourist attractions or the miles of natural splendor or the many hockey facilities. I felt as if I had been—against my will, frankly—dropped into the deeply odd daily life of an average Canadian family in the 80s. Simply put, this film is extremely Canadian.

You may be asking “Jeremy, what does it mean, exactly, for something to be ‘Canadian’ apart from its geographic designation?” Well, it’s just one of those things where you know it when you see it, I think. Like, if your neighbors were weird, and someone asked why your neighbors are weird, you might have a hard time explaining it without saying a hundred things that might not be that weird on their own but together they add up to more than the sum of their weird parts. Something like that.

Like if I said “Well, at one point, there’s a chase sequence that’s set to a Celine Dion song instead of tense, propulsive music,”* you’d say “Oh, that sounds pretty Canadian.” But that’s just scratching the surface. Because there are so many strange, almost inexplicable story choices on display in The Peanut Butter Solution that can’t reasonably be understood except by shrugging and saying “I don’t know, Canada?”

Here’s another one: The plot of this film revolves around a young boy named Michael suddenly losing all of his hair. How does he lose his hair, you might ask? Because he explores a recently burned-down building and sees the ghosts of homeless people, which gives him a severe case of “the fright,” which is what an actual (Canadian) doctor tells him. Can you really be spooked so severely that all of your hair falls out overnight? I don’t know. Maybe anything’s possible in Canada.

Speaking of those ghosts, there’s even Canadian Ghost Logic at play here. When Michael sees the ghosts again, they tell him the ingredients to a potion that will allow him to regrow his hair, which includes something called “crosby crackers.”** Anyway, these ghosts are able to do their haunted bidding in secret because, as they tell Michael, ghosts can only be heard if you can also see them. (I actually think this is some pretty clever supernatural story math. I’m surprised more films haven’t tried this.)

And then there’s the villain plot. The big bad guy is the disgraced signor of the local elementary school who has somehow kidnapped dozens of his students and forced them to work at a paintbrush factory where the bristles are all made from Michael’s hair (which is now constantly growing because he used too much of the ghosts’ magic hair potion). But that’s not even the Canadian part. (Neither is the fact that there’s somehow not a citywide manhunt for these missing kids.) The truly Canadian part is that the signor delivers these human hair paintbrushes to local art supply shops in an unmarked red van and doesn’t reveal his name or give a company name, and the shop owners are completely fine with it. When Michael’s friends ask a local shopkeeper about the whole thing, he kinda just shrugs it off as if to say “Oh, ya know, he seems like a nice man.” (Those Canadians are far too trusting.)

But the Canadianness doesn’t simply live within the world of the film, even when they’re drinking Pepsi at dinner and eating something called Toronto noodle soup.*** The writers of this film (there were four of them!) had to have been inextricably Canadian, whether by birth or by naturalization.

Because the most Canadian thing about this whole film is this: Michael’s friend Conrad, upon discovering the ghost potion that brought Michael’s hair back, asks to borrow the magic solution so that he can grow pubic hair. Folks, this isn’t just a weird inappropriate throwaway gag—we actually see Conrad’s pubic hair rapidly growing out of the bottom of his pants. It’s supremely weird. And then, like Canadian magic, his problem just…stops. (Why does Michael’s hair keep growing but Conrad’s doesn’t? You’ll have to ask Canada.)

So there you have it. Even Canada’s family films**** can’t help but be completely unhinged. At least they’ve got that healthcare thing figured out though.

*This is definitely a thing that happens in this film.

**I truly do not know what these are, and Google didn’t help. Most of my search results were Christmas albums.

***Again, no clue, and no help from Google. All I got were Asian restaurants in Ontario.

****The Peanut Butter Solution is actually the second film in a long-running French-Canadian kids series called Tales For All, which includes such other memorable titles as The Dog Who Stopped the War, Bach and Broccoli, and Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler. I cannot confirm that any of these films actually exist.

The Peanut Butter Solution is available on Tubi, Night Flight, and the Roku Channel, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.