Ghoulies - the adventures of a man and his quest for puppet creature domination

In the great pantheon of movies that lined the shelves at my often-mentioned and no doubt mysterious Greatest Video Store Ever, one of the ones that really sticks out in my head is Ghoulies.  While the Lick Ness Monster saw a ton of old-school and schlocky horror movies as a kid, for some reason, just the sight of this video box sent me running away screaming.  Giving this one a watch wasn't even an option.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that the mental image of a green, goofy-looking demon popping out of my toilet is one of my hidden phobias.

At any rate, it's been a LONG time since I've seen this one.  I eventually did see it sometime around 1992 on TBS and remember virtually nothing about it.  Even worse, since Wikipedia really sucks when it comes to the Ghoulies series and has virtually no notable information about it, I'm going to have to wing it with my own cutting journalistic integrity.  From what I can gather, this flick is a bit of a pre-Full Moon Productions project from no less than Charles Band himself, back when he ran a company called Empire Pictures.  Mr. Band was even set to direct the movie until passing on the honors to Luca Bercovici, a dude who has actually appeared as an actor in things ranging from Frightmare to the Wesley Snipes vehicle Drop Zone.  All things considered, he does a decent enough job doing the thing that I most admire - handling a $5.99 budget and a shoestring cast and making something reasonably resembling a film.  With that, THE MOVIE!!

The flick starts off on what's admittedly a pretty creepy note.  The dude you see in the above picture is running a patented Horror Movie Satanic Ritual, complete with the ever-popular downward-pointing Pentagram of Doom behind his pulpit.  He is all ready to sacrifice a baby until the mother stops him, at which point the guy goes into a fit of rage and informs the GOOD satanist that "YOU WILL TAKE HIS PLACE!"  All things told, a 17-star opening.

After the opening credits (which has some very mirthful and Pupper Master style music), a helpful narrator informs us that the baby was actually Satanic Master's SON.  Wow.  Brutal.  At any rate, that very baby is now all grown up and has just inherited dear ol' dad's secluded house.  His name is Jonathan Graves, and he's played by Peter Liapis.  Having seen this guy in a few other films and TV projects, I can report that Liapis is actually a pretty damn charismatic actor, able to pull off over-the-top stuff and everyman relatability with equal ease.  He's kind of like Christian Bale, if Christian Bale actually had talent.  I can't say the same for Lisa Pelikan, who plays "Rebecca," his girlfriend in this movie who makes the move into the house of death with him.  You've seen more raw emotion from Jessica Alba on sedatives. 

What this scene accomplishes is twofold: (1) it establishes that Jonathan's freakin' FATHER is actually buried on the premises in a fenced-in and very poorly disguised grave, and (2) introduces us to Wolfgang, the caretaker of the property who essentially served as Jonathan's de facto father growing up.  Since the Law of Economy of Characters clearly states that screenwriters generally do not introduce new characters into films for no apparent reason, we can reasonably guess that this guy will play some role later.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  Once inside the house, Jonathan promptly finds his dad's old ceremonial garb and book of incantations, at which point his poodle-haired girlfriend tells him that it's time to throw a party with all of their rockin' college friends.

After some classic '80s movie party scenes (including a legendary break-dancing routine by one of the party guests who kinda-sorta looks like Kiefer Sutherland), Jonathan (above left, along with his ever-supportive girlfriend) decides that the best party game would be to do one of the rituals from his mysterious book.  Seems like a sound enough plan to me.  He performs it - in a deep, profundo, overly theatrical voice, no less - and while it doesn't happen immediately, it works.  Soon enough, two miniature creatures appear from the nothingness in a special effect that must be seen to be believed.

From this point on, Jonathan undergoes a kind of sinister transformation.  He withdraws from school under the premise of "fixing up the house," and while he does that by day, by night, he begins practicing more of DAT BLACK MAGIC.  His first motions as Newfound Satanic Leader?  Calling forth a group of the ghoulies (finally) and creating a rain storm completely centralized within his basement.  Why?  Just because he can.  It should also be pointed out that when he performs these magic spells, his eyes occasionally flash green.  Because nothing says evil like snakey green eyes. 

In the midst of that second spell (the rainstorm), Rebecca catches him wearing his official ceremonial robe and brandishing a large spear and freaks out on him, causing Jonathan to promise to cut it the hell out with his devil worship.  And he seems oh-so-sincere.  This lasts all of five minutes of screen time, as Jonathan (along with one his Ghoulie pals) attempts to entrance Rebecca during sex, causing her to walk out on him for good. 

Well, this makes our beloved hero/villain go batshit criz-azy, as he uses his magical abilities to summon two imps named Grizzle and Greedigut.  I should also point out that Grizzle and Greedigut aren't puppet creatures like the rest of Jonathan's helpers, and instead are played by two honest-to-christ little people (Peter Risch and Tamara de Treaux, for those who absolutely, positively need this information) who put more heart and soul into their performances than anyone in the movie besides Liapis.  This movie has to be seen to be believed.  Anyway, he utilizes the imps to re-summon Rebecca to the house and take control of her mind and spirit (or something), and then begins setting up Act Three of the film - the legendary Satanic movie ritual, which in typical Satanic movie ritual fashion is ridiculously complicated, requiring seven people to work and to be performed during a full moon.  So you know what this means - yup, another '80s party, although this one isn't quite rockin'.

Have I mentioned before that this movie has given us sporadic narrative updates from the same guy who told us about Jonathan and his dad at the beginning of the film?  Well, we have.  Rest assurred, it's going somewhere.  At the dinner party, Jonathan takes command of his friends by yelling at the sky and causing the screen to flash white.  Remember how I said the ghoulies being conjured was the special effect to end all special effects?  I think that this may be the new champion.  The ritual takes place (with all of the secondary characters now donned in white robes, no less), and we get our payoff, as Jonathan's daddy RISES FROM THE GRAVE!

Coolness.  Turns out that this guy was really controlling his son's actions this whole time to facilitate his own return.  From here, the movie becomes a sped-up slahser flick, as the various party guests pair off and get laid while  a combination of Malcolm Graves (that would be Jonathan's dad) and the various critters roaming about the premises begin mowing them down.  The best death in this sequence is definitely Malcolm, posing as a hot blonde, choking the movie's resident womanizer to death utilizing his three-foot monster tongue in a sequence that no doubt inspired that awesome nurse scene in Nightmare on Elm Street 3.  This movie is picking up in a big way.

All of the secondary characters get killed off, leaving us with the Luke-Darth Vader confrontation between Jonathan and Malcolm.  We get our explanation for Malcolm's actions, as he explains that the ritual is about gaining the youth of his son.  In one of the most incestually homoerotic scenes in movie history, Malcolm attempts to drain his son's life by kissing him on the lips.  Yes, really.  All appears lost, until we are given a new savior.  The man, the myth...the caretaker.

Yup, the dude who had been invisible since the beginning of the movie is in actuality some kind of all-powerful sorcerer, and he's here to save the day.  In a battle very heavy on animated lightning bolts, he is able to overcome Malcolm and end this threat once and for all.  Not only that, Malcolm's death brings all of Jonathan and Rebecca's moronic college friends back to life, leaving us not only with the happy ending...but the mega happy ending.  The fact that some of the ghoulies stowed away in Jonathan's getaway car (along with Rebecca and Kiefer Sutherland guy) doesn't seem to diminish the sunniness too much...it's portrayed more comedically than anything else.  Eh, as someone who is used to modern horror movies with their M. Night Shyamalanadingdong nonsensical twist endings, this was a welcome change.

You know, reading through the above recap, you've probably noticed that there is only one picture of the titular Ghoulies contained in the every-few-paragraph visual aids.  That's not an accident.  For a movie called Ghoulies, they are basically there as window dressing.  Grizzle and Greedigut actually play the biggest role out of all the creatures Jonathan conjures up, going through a kind of babyface turn by the end of the movie and assisting Jonathan in his battle for the ages with his father.  The obvious answer is that this movie was released in 1985, a mere year after Gizmo and Stripe dominated the box office, and that Charles Band did his best to sneak in "hey, this is just like Gremlins" into his black magic movie.  Seems accurate enough to me.

That little caveat aside, this movie was actually a damn fun time.  I'm a big sucker for religious-themed horror movies in general, especially ones that don't take a big shift in tone midway through (not looking at you at all, The Reaping), and Ghoulies was good and gloriously ridiculous for its entire running time.  It's goofy, it's dumb, and it's woefully short on special effects quality and Shakespearian-esque dialogue, but that's just the way I like it.  I'll REMEMBER this movie.  There are movies with $150 million budgets every summer that I walk out of that I can't remember a single detail of two days later.

Of course, that is to be expected from a film produced by Charles Band.  He was renowned for this sort of thing - taking horror and fantasy scripts, producing them on the cheap, and adding a whole heap o' camp value.  After founding Full Moon Pictures a few years after this movie was released, he made this style of film-making into a virtual factory that cranked out scores of these types of films, and if you want to see this maverick/direct-to-video horror master in his formative stages, look no further.  This movie is full of that patented Charles Band charm.

Finally, Peter Liapis is just aces in this movie.  He hams it up when he has to, and pulls off the more restrained scenes very well.  Knowing that he has a role in the final movie in this series, I'm looking forward to shooting through the rest of the Ghoulies series...but I'm told that I have two movies that focus MUCH more on the creatures to get through first before coming full circle on Jonathan Graves.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Highly recommended for my fellow horror fans.

He's back...the man behind the KEYBOARD...and he's out of control!!

There's a legend 'round here. A reviewer buried, but not dead. A curse on the interwebz - a death curse. The Jon Lickness Curse. They say he got tired of horror flicks...but he keeps coming back.

Few have seen him and lived. Some, like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth, have tried to stop him. No one can!

They say he is still down there in deepest, darkest Minnesota...waiting...

Yes, folks, the legend is true. After a LONG resting period spent buried in metaphorical hallowed ground with my back squarely turned on horror flicks and, to a lesser extent, the few people who actively read me...I'm back. But it's not the same person that you're used to.

A little background information, if by some chance you're just happening upon this here blog site. A few years back, it all started out on what was then known as the Official WrestleCrap Forums (now known as the Official FAN Forum), where THIS GUY (*the douchebaggy thumb gesture makes its glorious return!*) made it his mission to review Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and all of the other long-running (read: never-ending) horror franchises that he had seen. Mission accomplished, only those reviews sucked royally. From there, the man known on the message board as Thomas Rigby became the Horror Nerd, focusing his efforts entirely on movies that he deemed to be technically "good," and set about inducting fifty movies into a personalized and always masturbatory Horror Hall of Fame. Once this very inauspicious task was completed, the Horror Nerd shed that extremely vanilla-sounding name and morphed, not unlike Sadako in the horrible Ringu sequel Rasen, to become Mr. Blood Guts N' Tears. This guy prided himself on writing horror commentary as well as taking on any and all horror movies that made their way into his collection, finally becoming, in the eyes of the author himself, a semi-decent reviewer.

But then, circumstances arose that drove Mr. BG&T away from the horror genre. These circumstances will be serving as those pesky GOOD kids in the slasher film who DON'T indulge in drugs, sex and all other manner of debauched behavior. You know, the hero and heroine. The nice guy and the virginal girl in this (horrible) allegory encompass a lot of different things. A complete lack of any and all horror films at the multiplex, and the only notable one being the certifiably awful The Devil Within (seen it, and it sucked). An unseasonably warm winter that didn't do much to keep me locked indoors, thus robbing me of my usually heavy wintertime horror-watching mood. Real-life issues that are far too boring to even think about getting into. All of it seemed to spell one thing - instant kryptonite for a stalwart horror villain. But little do those smiling, happy campers know that every horror villain has one more resurrection left in him. It only takes the right impetus...

Like, for starters, the fact that comicdom's ultimate bad girl from the wrong side of the tracks is being portrayed by a sweet, innocent girl next door-type who isn't convincing as anything BUT that, no matter how many gritty independent movies or how much "artistic nudity" she does in some desperate attempt to convince us otherwise. But hey, she's hot, and that will sell tickets.

With that good inflammatory statement out of the way, I have to state that much like Jason, Freddy and Michael (well, maybe - remember when Michael Myers had NO motive?) themselves, my return to torment/annoy my fellow horror fans was born of hate. See, April is upon us, leaving May and SUMMER MOVIE SEASON (capitalized because...well, it's Goddamn SUMMER MOVIE SEASON) right around the corner.

You know, there actually was a time when I looked FORWARD to this time of the year, when Hollywood would pull out all the stops in an attempt to wow us with their biggest, best, most commercially viable products. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.

I've seen all of the commercials. I've seen the slicked-up ads for The Avengers, and I can't think of anything but where I'd rather NOT be come Memorial Day weekend, or whenever the hell this overblown, overhyped POS is going to be unleashed on the public. I've read a couple of the on-set reports for the new Spider-Man movie, and can't feel anything but disgust over this completely UNNECESSARY overhaul of a series that was definitely NOT beyond saving, all for the purpose of making it more Twilight-fan friendly. And, while we're not getting one this year, I cringe thinking about the day when Johnny Depp's snarling mug is plastered on my tube again, hopefully with a much more apt title describing this latest cinematic opus - Pirates of the Caribbean: Well, Let's Milk This For All It's Worth.

The occasion is very rare when I walk out of a pure, unadulturated popcorn movie and DON'T want to rip my own eyeballs out. Why? They make me think back to the days of my youth, back when a movie with a huge budget was a RARE thing, and back when said movies used to feature tons of genuine love, soul and interest thrown into them. The original Star Wars trilogy (the prequels are dead to me). The '80s Indiana Jones movies (that last one doesn't exist - don't mention it). Terminator 1 and 2 (ditto with the latter films - noticing a trend yet?). The Die Hard series. The James Bond series before they went all emo, ultra-realistic and completely fun-free. These were movies that felt like a big deal before walking into that darkened room, and remained as such after walking out. Then I think about the countless action epics that dot the landscape these days with budgets roughly equal to a small nation's GDP, about how they SHOULD be cool and awe-inspiring, yet universally leave me cold. It's all sizzle-no sausage at cinemas these days, with boatloads of cartoony explosions and absolutely no time spent on, you know, the IMPORTANT stuff, like getting us emotionally invested in the events that are transpiring up on the screen and building up character motivation.

The reasons for this are numerous, and not all of it has to do with the storylines and characters sucking (although that's definitely the biggest part of it). The magic is completely gone from this type of film. I can remember, as a kid, seeing Mrs. Voorhees get her head chopped off in the climax of the original Friday the 13th, and thinking, "WOW! I wonder how they did THAT!" Now, I can look at planets exploding, robots pounding away on each other in intricately choreographed fights, and effeminate pirates staging colossal wars at sea, and I don't even think twice about any of it. I don't wonder how anything is done, because I KNOW how it's done. By some geek sitting on a laptop (which, you know, is VERY different to what I'm doing right now ;)). CGI makes creating ANYTHING a screenwriter can dream up relatively easy, but when you can do everything, ironically, you can't do anything.

I hate modern blockbusters. Just hate them. Hate every single overbudget, overproduced, audience-insulting one of these that hits the market. Hate the fact that these films with EVERY advantage, from top-notch effects teams to the best casts money can buy to highly heralded screenwriters churning out approximately 17 rewrites, can STILL find a way to suck.

Even the ones that I DON'T consider outright terrible are utterly forgettable in some form or another. Take last summer's Thor. A decent movie with a likable lead, but that promise quickly gets buried in its sea of never-ending fight scenes and thrills that depend on the theater's sound system to pull off. While I was ambivalent to it in theaters, have I ever once felt the need to watch the movie again? No. A year before that was Christopher Nolan's Inception. While the movie no doubt had a cool concept and solid execution, I'd be lying if I told you that I gave two s**ts about anything that happened in it. Free screenwriting tip: In your big, expensive summer sci-fi/action film, it's wise to make your stakes higher than whether or not a nondescript businessman can gain market share in the energy sector. Just sayin'.

So there I was, ready to march into another Summer of Discontent and more than likely to play like Willem Dafoe and take the pain when an unexpected Messiah descended from the heavens. A Friday the 13th popping up on the calendar. In April, no less, scant weeks away from the nonstop onslaught of special effects doomfests. Which meant that, for the first time in several months, I popped a horror film in the ol' DVD player...

And, like so many times before, I haven't stopped watching them since. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter gave way to The Prowler, which gave way to My Bloody Valentine, which gave way to Prom Night, which gave way to Ju-On...you get the idea. Compared to the films that dominate the box office charts from here until September, these movies are such a welcome change. As opposed to featuring the world's greatest visual effects maestros, big names above the marquee and still smacking of laziness, these movies are labors of love, no matter how "bad" some of them may technically be.

I can't hate any movie made under the circumstances that so many of these movies are made. I respect them. I respect the hell out of the fact that some director took an inane script (that may have even been written by the director himself!), that actors chose to portray these roles as written on the page, that a gifted makeup wizard spent untold hours slaving away at a work bench to make the exploding-head death in scene 37 look JUST right. That EVERYONE involved in these films did their absolute damndest to make them as good as they could possibly be given the almost unbearable conditions that they were placed in. Screw Transformers and G.I. Joe and their precious $200 million worth of CGI fire. Give me handmade special effects, a mediocre-but-hardworking cast, and a Filet-o-Fish value meal budget ANY day.

Last winter, Mr. Blood Guts N' Tears suffered a long, painful death at the hands of fate. And thus, over the course of one weekend, he was revived by a combination of love and hate. Only now, he is something much worse. Undead. Unhinged. And Unstoppable. Love for campfire scary stories, cheesy soundtracks and cliches, guys named "Crispin" and girls named "Takako" back and stronger than ever. Hatred for (most) zombie movies, rock singers attempting to write "horror," and beat-you-over-the-head "message" flicks also back and stronger than ever. Someone who is completely forsaking Hollywood's prime time summer season now and for the ever-foreseeable future. Ladies and gentlemen...this is Lick Ness Monster's Horror Movie Mayhem!

You know, it's times like this that I really wish I was more tech-savvy, and that I had a friend who knew how to edit videos. Because let me tell you something (brother)...the vignette that I have pictured in my head that would air right here is something else. Just imagine that sexy guy you saw firsthand in the Basket Case 2 review getting berated by a few friends for leaving the horror genre behind, a brief interlude of me watching Highlander and other non-horror material, opening up my DVD cabinet, the once ever-increasing horror collection now stagnant. Then, I see a series of ads for upcoming action movies and become incensed. You know where it goes from here. Running up and down stairs to the tune of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," taking in movies ranging from Don't Go in the Woods to Manos: The Hands of Fate, clubbing away on a speed bag, the camera reversing the angle to show that I'm beating up on a cutout of Michael Bay's face. Priceless, I tell ya. Or maybe it's a lot funnier in my head than it is in prose writing form. Or maybe I'm just a moron.

Anyway...what to expect from here on out? We're going back to the past, back to a time when cheaply made horror movies weren't relegated solely to the direct-to-DVD production line. Back to a time when a lot of them actually made it to THEATERS, bah gawd. Back to the time of my childhood, which also not-so-coincidentally happens to be the '80s and early '90s, when many, many Saturday nights consisted of trips to video stores and return trips laughing with my brother (RIP, bro) about what lay in store for us when we got home. Back to a time when a whole slew of movies about "little demons" of some sort or another came to be in the wake of the success of Gremlins...

TO BE CONTINUED!