So, after I finished Blow, I decided to follow up with something short. Ghoulies is on my Must-See poster under small creatures or some such and runs about an hour and twenty minutes. That fits the bill just fine. But as I was watching it, I realized it was somewhat familiar. Growing up, my parents would sometimes take us into Philadelphia to visit Dad’s parents and sister. My aunt and grandma would often take us to the local video store to rent stuff, and one times, my aunt brought back Ghoules. I don’t remember much why or anything along those lines, but the box did promise the cast included the “remarkable actress who played E.T.” That’s true. The actress Tamara De Treaux, a little person, did wear the E.T. suit and is in Ghoulies. I recognized the scene she was in as the female half of a pair of small goblin people. That is almost the entirety of what I remember of Ghoulies.
I also remember not being overly impressed with this movie. I don’t think I saw the ending before.
The movie opens with a demonic getting ready to sacrifice a baby when a woman leaps forward to say she wasn’t on board with that, so the cult leader decides to let the child go with a friendly (to the baby) minion and to sacrifice the woman instead. There’s actually a pretty decent effect of the woman’s heart presumably starting to rise up to burst out of her chest, or something along those lines because what exactly happens after that bulge pops up in the middle of her chest. Regardless, years later that baby is now a grown man. Jonathan Graves (Peter Liapis) has inherited the mansion from the opening from his late father Malcolm (Michael Des Barres), who was of course the cult leader. Jonathan and his girlfriend Rebecca (Lisa Pelikan) are moving in. While hosting a party for their 80s stereotype friends whose names I never really learned, Jonathan tries out some of the occult stuff he found in the basement. Nothing seems to happen, but soon Jonathan is more interested in gaining power with black magic, even summoning the diminutive title characters, but there may be reasons beyond his rather sudden interest in dark power than he knows.
Actually, there may be more to it than I know. Honestly, I found this movie dull, so if Jonathan had a reason to suddenly want to practice black magic, I have no idea what it is. I might have missed it, or the movie implied it was because of something from the prologue, or he doesn’t have one. All are possible.
That actually says a lot about this movie. Described as a “horror comedy” at least by Wikipedia, I can’t say that I found the movie all that scary or funny. Jonathan’s eyes glow green, so he takes to wearing sunglasses all the time. The Ghoulies are invisible to everyone but him, so he friends can’t see them sitting in or eating the dinner they are all enjoying. The sleaziest guy in the friend-group is named “Dick”. So much of what comes out of this movie looks like something I have seen before in much better movies, perhaps most memorably in Poltergeist. The movie is mostly a Gremlins rip-off, and not a very good one at that. I didn’t see much of anything worth recommending.
OK, there was one thing: for largely immobile rubber puppets, the Ghoulies themselves actually look pretty good. The most creative aspects of the movie went into designing the creatures, a variety of small things with different looks and even minor differences in behavior. The scene where Jonathan summons them shows the creatures coming out of murky water, a tree, or even a mound of dirt. Yeah, they don’t do a whole hell of a lot, but as relatively inexpensive puppets go, they were at least nice to look at. Too bad the movie wasn’t very good.
You know, once again I am left to wonder why that poster of mine suggests a lackluster (or worse) movie is a “must see”, Sure, this thing apparently spawned some sequels, but I won’t be looking into those anytime soon. I figure the poster just needed some movies to stick in the small creatures subcategory, but considering the others are the 80s classic Gremlins, the fine kid’s horror movie The Gate, or the at least entertaining Critters, I think I would have been fine without this one being included.
Grade: F
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