The Ghoulies Quadrilogy: A Retrospective

Ah, the Ghoulies series. The sort-of Gremlins clone that evolved into an actual Gremlins clone and went off the rails from there. It's a series that's inextricably associated with toilets, which is a fitting thematic tie because they all belong in one.

My history with the Ghoulies films is a long and strange one. I first discovered the series on the back of a box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran. At some point in the late 2000's, Kellogg's had a deal where you could send in a certain number of box tops and get a DVD from a selected portion of the MGM home video collection. One of the films available for purchase was the Ghoulies/Ghoulies II double feature. I was intrigued because my favorite movie is Gremlins, and a clone of my favorite movie seemed like a good idea at the time. However, no matter how much I love Raisin Bran, I wasn't going to eat a dozen boxes of cereal to get a DVD, so I got it from Netflix's DVD service (this being back in the day when Netflix actually cared about their DVD service).

Up until this point I had never seen a "bad" movie, but I had a general conception of what they were like. Yes, sadly the Ghoulies franchise was my introduction to the weird world of bad cinema. Eight years and many stops and starts later, I have finally reached the end. I have seen all four Ghoulies films, and I have no one to blame but myself.

Ghoulies (1985)

My first impression of the inaugural Ghoulies film is a bit hazy, and rightfully so because this is a pretty forgettable film. On my revisit for this retrospective, I was surprised by how strange and jumbled it is. The film is far more concerned with possession and black magic than it is with the titular creatures. There are also Viking dwarves for unknown reasons. The plot is equally bland. Some schmoe inherits a mansion and then gets possessed by his long-lost evil dad. A lot of filler ensues. Jack Nance of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks fame makes a brief appearance as a craggy wizard, which is one of the few memorable aspects of the film.

Despite all this, I still don't hate Ghoulies. There's a dreamy Italian horror atmosphere permeating the film, what with the moldering mansion setting and all the strange non-ghoulie monsters. The cast is nothing to write home about, but the image of that stoner guy breakdancing in the party scene is one of the few things about Ghoulies to stick with me over the years. Plus, there's the immortal line "They call me Dick, but you can call me Dick". It's boring and lacking in toilet-ghoulie action, but there's enough weird crap going on to make it halfway tolerable.

Ghoulies II (1988)

This was my favorite of the two Ghoulies films at age 14, and I have no clue why. Maybe it was the giant ghoulie from the end. Maybe it was the scene where that clown that gets his arm bitten off by the green ghoulie. Maybe it's the fact that I was and still am easily amused by stop-motion animation. Either way, I'm not sure what I was thinking at the time. I rewatched the film two years later for this blog (the review of which can be read here) and I was particularly harsh on it. On my third viewing of the film, I'm still not a fan, but I will acquiesce that the finale does have its merits.

The problem that I still have with Ghoulies II is that it takes too long to get to the ghoulie action and the buildup is like watching paint dry. A carnival is about to go out of business when suddenly the ghoulies show up (but only in brief appearances) and become the star attraction. Too bad they're also killing the clientele. Let's face it, Generic Scrappy Carnival Dude is not nearly as interesting as Breakdancing Stoner Guy from the first film, and that guy was hardly even a character. This one feels far more like a Gremlins rip-off, complete with the requisite wacky shenanigans. The ghoulies mess around with carnival equipment and make squawky Frank Welker noises. Ha-ha? The special effects are certainly better this time around, I'll give it that. Plus, a ghoulie does eat someone sitting on the toilet. Sadly we don't get to actually see the victim, a second-rate Judge Reinhold corporate stooge antagonist, punch the ticket, but it's a step in the right direction.

I was more miserable watching this than I was while watching the first Ghoulies, but I would gladly rewatch Ghoulies II before I would ever sit through the first one again. It sucks because it tries to cash in on the success of Gremlins and fails, but it's at least more coherent and competent than the first one. It fails on its own merits but is probably overall the better viewing experience of the two.

Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College (1991)

In a reversal of my feelings towards Ghoulies II, I have no idea why I didn't like Ghoulies III the first time I saw it (review here). Maybe it's because my taste in movies has gotten increasingly worse over the years and my love for cornball humor has only increased. Whatever the reason, I now can say with confidence that this is the crown jewel of the Ghoulies series. That's not saying much, mind you. The whole movie is basically a low-rent college sex comedy that even the likes of Hot Dog... The Movie and Screwballs II: Loose Screws would cringe at. The ghoulies themselves are on the periphery, but they do get to hang out with Kevin "I was a respected actor, once" McCarthy for a while.

It's college prank week and amid all the pranks (or "yanks" as the movie strangely calls them) the ghoulies are summoned via a comic book. That's not how it worked the past two times, but who cares. The ghoulies are back, and this time they talk. Oh boy, do they love to talk. I had issues with their incessant and schmucky Three Stooges routine the first time, but for whatever reason, it clicked with me this time. The ghoulies creep on women in the shower, chug obviously empty beer cans, and talk about their penises way more than anyone ever wanted to hear. The ghoulies, much like the movie itself, are gleefully stupid and obnoxious. It's all the worst traits of 1980's high school and college movies rolled into one film. Why watch the Revenge of the Nerds films (which no one should ever do) when you could watch Ghoulies III instead?

If you only have time to watch one Ghoulies film, make it this one. It's the one in which the ghoulies get the most screentime, so you can't go wrong there. Kevin McCarthy really does give it his all even though this movie doesn't deserve him. Anyone who can play a character named Professor Ragnar with a straight face, or act out a scene in which he tries to make the ghoulies say "The ghoulies have no dicks" with complete dignity is truly a master of his craft. There is also an on-screen toilet death, making this the only film of the four to feature the sole promise of the series.

Ghoulies IV (1994)

The redheaded stepchild of the series, the one that kept me from completing the quadrilogy, the perplexing finale that is Ghoulies IV. I was hesitant to watch this for years because it infamously does not include "real" ghoulies in the film, rather little people wearing cheap masks. Even the rubbery, barely articulated puppets of Ghoulies III are better than that. But it was my quest to finally finish this series once and for all, so I buckled down and sat through this mess. It's bad, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be. I prepared for the worst and I got something that was only mildly intolerable.

For whatever reason, Ghoulies IV is actually a direct sequel to the first film, bringing back the lead from that film. He's a cop now. There's some junk about a magic crystal, and there's an evil dominatrix roaming around killing people. The faux-ghoulies show up sometimes and eat fried chicken. There's a guy doing an Art Carney impression that promptly gets killed by the dominatrix. It's all shot with the flat, tacky lighting of a cheap softcore porno. This comes as no surprise because director Jim Wynorski mostly makes softcore porn films. As banal and unnecessary as the film is, that willfully stupid "we know this is bad, and we don't care" porno attitude is at least something. It's not endearing, but it's an attitude that keeps the film from actively fading from memory as you watch it. The faux-ghoulies, while obnoxious, are tolerable if only because they barely do anything. Their scenes are undeniably awful, but they at least go by quickly, like ripping off a band-aid.

Ghoulies IV is such a bizarre and lazy note on which to end the series. In a way, that's fitting, because the whole series is bizarre and lazy. It doesn't make this movie any more watchable, but if you feel compelled to watch this whole series, it's not as painful as you would think.

At the end of my eight-year journey through this series, I have turned back to reflect on why I was drawn to it in the first place. I think it's just my fascination with the mediocre and bad corners of cinema. That a film as unremarkable as Ghoulies spawned three sequels is baffling. I am fascinated by films that can toe the line and succeed by barely trying at all. These movies cost almost nothing to make, so any money generated is almost sure to turn a profit. These weird low-effort money machine franchises like Puppet Master, Leprechaun, and of course Ghoulies are endlessly interesting. The fact that four of these movies exist at all is more interesting than the movies themselves, but I'm glad that the Ghoulies franchise exists. It's pathetic and lazy series, but I'm still talking about it 24 years after the last film was released, so clearly, they did something right.

Movie Review- Rolling Thunder (1977)

Rolling Thunder is an exploitation movie that forgets to actually exploit anything. It follows a POW named Major Charles Rane who has returned home to his family in Texas after being imprisoned in Vietnam for several years. However, Rane's return home is not a happy one. His wife and son are shot and killed during a home invasion, and the Major loses a hand. After being released from the hospital, he tracks down the criminals with the help of a waitress and Tommy Lee Jones, hell-bent on getting revenge by way of a prosthetic hook and a sawed-off shotgun.

Given the premise of hook-handed ex-military vigilante justice, one might expect this film to revel in its exploitative cheesiness. However, Rolling Thunder plays itself dead serious and deliberately paced; there is little action until the last 20 minutes or so of the film. The gritty and grounded approach feels like wasted potential, because a majority of the film is Rane going "boy, I am sure am going to kill those guys when I find them". A touch of nuance or substance, anything, would help to strengthen the many ambling scenes in the film. To make matters worse, the villains have no motivation. They appear suddenly 30 minutes into the film with no prior buildup and are not seen again until the film's final moments. It has been said that a film's hero is only as good as his villain, and these villains are hardly memorable, let alone present in the film.

The film's approach to violence is bothersome as well. It handles vigilante justice with a dour, nihilistic attitude that is not fun to watch. Vigilante characters like the Punisher, for example, work best when the moral ramifications of violence are thrown out the window and the viewer can indulge the inner reptilian brain's craving for people getting blown up. If Rolling Thunder had a greater comment on the nature of violence, or any deeper meaning at all, the grim approach to vigilantism could work. But as it stands, it reflects a repugnant attitude found in other 70's vigilante films such as Straw Dogs and Death Wish, an attitude that takes a bothersome glee in sadistic justice. 

I would have much preferred the cartoonish approach to violence. Keep in mind this is a film where the hero sharpens his prosthetic hook hand on a grindstone for the express purpose of attacking people. Taken in the right direction, this could have been a pulpy fun time. I would even be happy if it were a  poignant comment on the futility of revenge. I just wish the film wasn't so middling. Narratively, it is dull and padded out, but from a technical standpoint it is perfectly serviceable. There are some generally well-constructed themes throughout, including PTSD flashback sequences that would used again to similar effect in First Blood. Just add this one to the long list of "not exactly bad per se, just not all that spectacular" movies.

Movie Review- The Lego Movie (2014)

Originally written Feb 17 2014

The Lego Movie. Something I could have only dreamed of as a lad. But since popular toys are getting blockbuster movies these days, it’s only a matter of time before Lego jumped on the bandwagon. I was skeptical at first, because kids movies are generally crap. But the initial reviews were positive, and the audience consensus seemed to be that The Lego Movie was fantastic. And then I saw it.

It’s an okay movie, but it’s way over-hyped. It’s flashy and colorful to the point of occasionally being an eyesore, and the animation is more spastic than Superjail! on speed. It’s definitely a style over substance kind of movie. That doesn’t make it terrible, but it’s certainly not 90something percent on Rotten Tomatoes good. The overall design of the movie is fantastic. The sets and environments have that awe-inducing feel of massive Lego landscapes they sometimes have set up at cons. The character design is excellent as well. The textures and shading are incredibly realistic, and the attention to detail on the minifigs is impeccable.

The animation is obviously CG at times, but for the most part the animation team did a great job of recreating the low frame-rate look of stop motion animation. The only problem is that most scenes constantly have stuff crap flying around in the background, and it’s usually a distraction from whatever’s going in on the foreground. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of creative stuff going on with the animation. While the action scenes are painfully frenetic there are a few nifty things here and there, like Lego vehicles being rapidly reassembled in the midst of a chase scene.

While it was a clever idea to do the movie as if it were being written in the mind of a 10-year-old, there’s a reason they don’t let kids write movies. The whole thing is painfully cliche-ridden and full of unfunny overused jokes. (Why yes, Starbucks does charge a lot for coffee. I’ve never heard a joke about that before. EVER.) You can’t come up with a lame script and get away with it by angling it that it’s from the mind of a kid. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but it’s not fun to actually have to watch.

This isn’t so much a criticism of the movie itself, but something that really bothered me about the ending: that kid is a total dillweed. Will Ferrell was right all along. The kid clearly has his own Legos to mess around with, but instead chooses to mess with his dad’s obviously expensive model setup. As a purchaser of Legos myself, I can tell you now that to put something together like Will Ferrell did would cost several thousand dollars to assemble. Admittedly Will Ferrell was acting a bit OCD about the whole thing, but that kid should have stuck with his own stuff and left his dad alone.

Overall, this is just okay. The whole thing is a visual overload and has a really boring script. There are occasional moments of fun, and the designs for everything are fantastic, but that doesn’t make up for the lame majority. It will probably entertain your kids, but that’s about it. If Charlie Day screaming about spaceships and Will Arnett doing a shopworn Batman impression sounds like your cup of tea, maybe go check it out. Otherwise, just watch the trailer on Youtube. That way you can see all the cool designs and save yourself 100 minutes.

Movie Review- Bad Milo! (2013)

Originally written Feb 23, 2014

Bad Milo!- the story of a movie that promised little and gave nothing. When you have a ludicrous premise for a movie, it’s an uphill battle trying to get people to take you seriously. Most of the time, filmmakers go for the “Might as well have fun with this” approach and let the weirdness run wild. But the guys behind Bad Milo! decided to take on the Sisyphean task of making a dramedy about a colon-demon and then were promptly squished by their figurative boulder.

In case you were unaware, Bad Milo! is a movie about a guy with a carnivorous demon living in his intestines. The premise sounds good(ish) on paper, but somehow the writers royally screwed it up. The first 15 minutes or so of the movie had potential, but the story completely shifts gears after that and everything goes down from there.

The main character, Duncan, goes to see a therapist after having nightmare visions of Milo. The therapist is a generic hippie guy played by the woodchipper guy from Fargo, who tells him that he has some sort of ancient demon living in his guts. The therapist tells Duncan that he needs to come to terms with Milo, and then he’ll go away. (Get it? Dealing with personal demons, except it’s an actual demon! Hilarious!)

What follows is what can only be described as a weird indie dramedy with ass-monsters. Duncan decides to make amends with his estranged father, but apparently his dad has a colon-monster too. The movie is pretty much a blur of sappy father/son bonding stuff, with the occasional rubbery puppet popping up to break the monotony. But even then the stuff with Milo isn’t that interesting. There’s a whole realm of silly possibilities to explore in an colon-demon movie, and the potential is never tapped into.

For what’s supposed to be a horror-comedy, there’s not much humor either. There’s a brief bit about how Milo’s killings have been blamed on a rabid raccoon, and that’s about as funny as it gets. The rest is just poor attempts at gross-out humor. There’s a certain line that has to be crossed before something becomes so gross it’s funny, but Bad Milo! constantly falls short of that line.

Overall, this is a weird and lame movie. I’m not sure what the writers were going for, and it doesn’t seem like they knew either. The movie has two modes- gross and melodrama. The shifts between the two are really distracting and make the movie drag like crazy. Bad Milo! barely clocks in at 80 minutes,but it feels considerably longer than that. This is a movie about a butt-monster for crying out loud, it should at least be entertainingly bad. Unfortunately all we got was a boring and confusing concoction of a movie.

Movie Review- The Mutilator (1985)

The Mutilator is an oddity; it is the apotheosis of the slasher film, but it came out several years after the subgenre's boom in the early 1980's. It's an endearingly ramshackle film. It is appparent that everyone involved making this film was having a grand old time, and never taking themselves too seriously. Any slasher film that features a catchy shag song as its theme has clearly placed fun as its chief priority.

The story is effectively simple. In an opening flashback, a young boy named Ed accidentally shoots and kills his mother. Flash forward years later and the young boy is now a 20something-pretending-to-be-a-college-student headed to a North Carolina beach house for some fall break shenanigans with his friends. Unfortunately, when they arrive, Ed's father is still hanging around, and Dad is still upset about the whole "dead wife" incident. And so he stalks and kills the nubile youngsters in the classic slasher formula.

My personal meter of slasher film quality is its ability to successfully provide a variant on a well-worn theme. This usually amounts to "Are the horror parts inventive?" and "Are the non-horror parts engaging?". The Mutilator's villain is just a crotchety old guy, so nothing particularly scary there. But if nothing else, this film is dedicated to its cheap thrills and presents gory scenes that still manage to shock today. The filler in between the audience-attracting violence is where the film's charm lies. The sloppy technical details are endearing in a way. There is no consistency between night and day shots; characters continually walk in from the moonlit beach to the sunlit beach house. The comic relief character Ralph is operating on some strange manic level of existence that is always entertaining. The music cues often drown out dialogue, and so on. This is not a so-bad-it's-good film, the movie is having too much fun with itself to be truly bad. This is a film that invites you to have fun alongside it, not at its own expense. The Mutilator set out a modest goal to be a lunkheaded slasher film, and not only does it achieve that goal, it manages to  have fun in the process. With a narrow subgenre like slashers, that bit of fun is all I ask for.