Ghoulies

    There’s a very real chance I might hate this movie. What started as a revisit mostly about judging my much-younger self quickly went off the rails when I realized that the movie that had scared me so many years ago was actually ‘Ghoulies II,’ not the original ‘Ghoulies,’ and that I’d never seen so much as a second of this movie before. I had no memories, no nostalgia, nothing to go on but the movie itself, and the movie is terrible.

    I was actually looking forward to giving it a chance during the first scene as I realized this was completely new to me. Sure, it was an obvious set, and sure the only interesting actor was only interesting in how terrible and hammy his line reads were, but he was playing a cult leader in the 80’s, I was willing to cut him some slack. And then the credits started and I actually recognized some names. Producer Charles Band, a schlockmeister supreme, you’ve seen at least one of his movies, creature designer John Carl Buechler, who did special effects for the Halloween, Friday the 13^th and The Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and a little baby Mariska Hargitay in her first ever role as one of the disposable victims. These are industry veterans, they had to know their stuff.

     Well, this was made in 1984, early in their careers, with a first time director and a script written by the same guy who wrote ‘S.F.W.’ ten years later.

    I’m not even going to address the entire movie, I’ll tell you the premise and go through the first few scenes and you’ll be able to guess the rest: a Satanic high priest is stopped from sacrificing his infant son by its mother through means of a magic talisman and is spirited away. The child grows up and inherits his father’s estate and starts to be seduced by the dark magic stuff lying around. He has a girlfriend and college buddies and there are little rubber critters running around that were summoned by black magic. Things happen, it ends on a stupid freeze-frame twist.

    Now let’s just go through the first five scenes, which, by the way, gets us 20 minutes into this 77 minute movie.

    It opens in a basement set with some titular Ghoulies scattered in the foreground stone cold chilling watching a group of be-robed cult members shuffling towards an alter. It establishes the first member in line is holding what is clearly a wrapped baby. Our cult leader steps in from frame left and snatches away his clearly non-see-through mask to reveal green eyes and killer cheekbones. He rasps some incantation, throws Party City sparklers into a nearby brazier, and crosses his arms like it means something. The cult member brings the wrapped baby forward at this cue and sets it on the altar. The leader unwraps the head to reveal gasp a baby, who cries and alerts a woman standing among the cultists, who suddenly looks concerned. The leader grabs a dagger, clearly about to commence the stabbing, when the woman rushes forward with a cry of “No, you promised!” She snatches the baby off the altar and continues, “You promised, not our child!”

How's MacGyver going to foil his plans this time?

    Which immediately raises questions. This was not thrown together on a Tuesday because the baseball double header got rained out, things had been leading to this moment. At least nine months of preparation, rather by definition. Also there was some organizing time before this ritual, it was pretty clearly choreographed, let’s give her the entire benefit of the doubt and assume she hit traffic and rolled up right before they literally walked into the room. She had long enough on the walk to the altar to realize it was a baby being sacrificed so the best spin we can give on this is that she was cool with a baby being sacrificed, just not her baby, which apparently she recognized just by its cry. So far not willing to award parent of the year.

    As the leader insists the baby must be sacrificed, not even addressing the fact that he clearly broke a pretty important promise to not sacrifice their baby so I give this couple a few months tops, she takes the opportunity to slip a necklace from around her neck and onto the baby and yell at her S.O. “You can’t hurt him now.” Which in the light of the rest of the movie raises questions about the necklace which it will stubbornly refuse to answer.

    Making with the Bela Legosi arm movements the leader compels her to put the baby back on the altar. So we’ll assume it was her necklace that was previously protecting her from his mind-mojo but the now the baby has it, which unsurprisingly does not turn out to be a good move for her long-term. Also, more evidence that their relationship had some pretty serious boundary issues if you need magical accessories to keep everything nice and consenual.

    The leader attempts to place hands on the baby and 1984 special effects happen and repel him. He angrily demands the baby be taken away and a cultist, who had an unmotivated close-up a few moments before and who I’m pretty sure is who put the baby on the altar in the first place so none of these are great people, gathers up the baby and with a couple more unmotivated close-ups skedaddles out of the basement and onto the estate grounds, baby in tow, vowing to keep him safe, which not a great track record there so far, buddy. Meanwhile the leader rasps at the woman “You will take his place!” and then there are close-up shots of Ghoulies enacting a low-budget version of the chest-buster scene from ‘Alien’ on her.

    Credits occur.

    A voice-over expo-dumps that the baby grew up, the leader died, and then the former-baby inherited his dad’s mansion. This all seems fine.

    A middle-aged couple wander onto the same mansion grounds the cultist fled through with the baby confirming that he has indeed inherited the house and the grounds and then he and has girlfriend are just right there staring at a grave. Total introduction time: 27 seconds. The grave has an inverted pentagram on the headstone and he insists on checking it out while she is hesitant. This is all of the characterization these two are ever given.

    Suddenly, creepy groundskeeper! It’s the presumably now ex-cultist guy with a fake beard. He is unnecessarily creepy and the scene kind of peters out.

Listen, there's no age limit for attending college.

    Next they’re in a room with bookshelves and she’s reading out titles with words like ‘ritual’ and ‘black magic’ and such. Suddenly, rat! She’s is scared, he is not. Really driving those characterizations home. He tells her to start cleaning upstairs, he’ll start downstairs. This is how mansions are cleaned, apparently.

    As he’s cleaning downstairs a door behind him creaks open, presumably for the sake of tension. He wanders into the scene of the earlier ritual holding a lit candle and all I can think about is how many takes that actor had to do where the candle blew out. He wipes dust off the floor to reveal clearly spooky-ass sigils and is cool with this. He picks one random box out of like a hundred, opens it up, finds what is obviously a spellbook and Satanic robes, and we’re done cleaning the basement.

So I'm no expert but what you have there might be a spellbook.

    Next there is a scene that is literally 24 seconds long where a party is mentioned.

She deserves quite a bit better than this guy.

    The next scene is the party. It party lasts four and a half minutes and does exactly two things: establishes that their friends are loathsome, and that our … protagonist? Wants to hold a ritual. Which they then do.

I feel ya, buddy.

    So they go downstairs, hold a ritual which apparently does nothing, then wander away before the scene cuts to … the true face of terror!

The true face of terror!

    This came out the same years as ‘Gremlins,’ which presumably helped with the distribution, maybe the financing, but other than your basic ‘small monsters cause havoc’ premise they’re nothing alike. None of this move is fun or clever or particularly well done. The poster for the move was a little Ghoulie popping out of a toilet and that is so at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie that it’s borderline false advertising. I’m not a gore fan and don’t handle tension all that well but either of those things would have been preferable to the frustrating monotony I got instead.

    I do hate this movie. It’s dumb and badly written, not scary in the least, and I was never able to spot Mariska Hargitay. Some of the puppet effects are not terrible and there is exactly one hammy performance by Michael Des Barres that is even worth mentioning. The rest is a waste of your time. It’s not so-bad-it’s-good, it’s so-bad-it’s boring. The only reason I’m not being even harder on this movie is that I know worse exists out there. Looking at you ‘Munchies.’