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April 18, 2009

Ghoulies

By Rufus

This post is a part of the 3rd Annual White Elephant Film Blogathon

When I was little I spent a lot of time in the video store fingering through the racks of VHS tapes trying to find stuff I hadn’t watched yet. I remember being creeped out by Ghoulies’ cover, which featured a small green man coming out of a toilet. This scared me because having a green guy come out of the toilet to grab me by the balls while taking a shit was horrifying. I mean that’s a sacred space and should not be violated.

What I didn’t know and didn’t get to experience until just recently was that the cover was appropriate. This movie belongs in the toilet. It is far from the worst movie I’ve had to review here (see blog-a-thon reviews I and II for my rage and hate filled reviews of other films.) Granted the first one was more rage filled than the second. This movie was just bland. The directing by Luca Bercovici is strictly of point and shoot variety and nothing was impressive or so horrible that it was unwatchable. This is the sort of movie that you see late night on Cinemax or Showtime around Halloween. Its something to put on and forget about it. Did I mention it is a Charles Band production? Band is responsible for such classics as the Subspecies series, the Gingerdead Man series, several of the Puppet Master movies as well as the classics Troll, Rawhead Rex, and Creepozoids. Oh and Robojox. Yeah Band is pretty impressive, in a supremely trashy sort of way.

Anyway back to the show. So the basic plot is that Jonathan Graves (Peter Liapis) moves into a spooky mansion complete with a mysterious grave and a groundskeeper named Wolfgang (played by the amazing Jack Nance who is totally underutilized here) with his girlfriend Rebecca (Lisa Pelikan). He finds black magic books in the library and instead of moving out immediately (like any sane person would) he throws a party with a bunch of loser friends and attempts to summon demons using the books. Smart. Also there is break dancing. Really, really bad breakdancing. Oh the best part of this film is Donna who is played by Mariska Hargitay in her first film role. She is totally hot and everytime she came on screen I heard the BUM BUM sound of L&O. I’m like Palov’s dog of cable tv.

Jonathan also immediately is drawn to the dark side. The day after the party he quits school and starts doing spells in the basement while wearing awesomely metal wizard robes. He summons two midgets with horrible teeth and even worse helmets. Things escalate and soon he is brainwashing his girlfriend and summoning his dead father Malcom (played by rocker Micheal Des Barres) from the grave. He also summons the Ghoulies. For a gremlins ripoff this movie lacks weird little guys. The ghoulies don’t even show up until the end of the movie and even then the reanimated corpses of Jonathan’s friends do most of the destruction. Then thanks to some last minute intervention no one really dies and Jonathan’s eyes return from their evil neon green (totally ‘80s) to their normal whatever they are. At least it was a short film, and enjoyable in a cheesy I’ll never watch this again sort of way. The second best part of the movie was Keith Joe Dick playing Dick who, well, was a dick. He got killed by a large rubber tongue that came from a cross-dressing evil wizard: Metal.

In short: the special effects are horrible, the comedy is lame and the horror is non-existent. There isn’t even blood or nudity to make it a late night B-movie. Mariska Hargitay is hot, Dick was a dick and the ghoulies don’t do much of anything. Oh and as far as toilets go? You should be safe.

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