Ghoulies

Ghoulies

1985

Dir; Luca Bercovici

"They'll get you in the end"

Some shit puppets happily ruin a perfectly good haunted house picture.

This is a mostly effective little play on a haunted house story which is only let down by Full Moon head honcho, Charles Band's addiction to shit puppetry (which may or may not be in part due to the fact that he is a bit of a muppet). For the most part, Ghoulies feels like an old Hammer Horror movie with atmospheric sets, decent production values and an enjoyable black magic story which largely plays out via very effective Hammer-esque witch coven and magic ritual sequences. Although this is often described as a horror comedy there's little evidence of comedy in the movie itself. As more sequels were excreted, comedy seeped into the forefront of the formula but although you might laugh at the crappy puppets I think this movie was made with quite serious intentions. The marketing department certainly treated it as a comedy horror, giving it a cover depicting one of the ghoulies wearing T-Shirt and braces, coming out of a toilet. I'm sure if Mr Band saw an opportunity to make money out of a comedy horror picture as opposed to a straight up horror picture he would have jumped at it, after all, horror comedies were all the rage in 1985.

The film kicks off with a very effective witch coven scene in which Malcolm Graves, the leader of the coven performs a very nice hammer-esque black magic ritual in the basement of a spooky old house. Graves is less effective when he removes his mask to show off his 80's surfer dude half head highlights. He tries to sacrifice his son, who is still a baby, but neon blue 80's lightening effects stop him from fulfilling his evil plan. Instead he sacrifices the babies mother by sucking her heart out of her chest. The always excellent, but underused on this occasion, Jack Nance takes the baby to safety. The evil ghoulies from the front of the video box watch the ritual from cages at the side of the room.

Years later the baby, Jonathan, is all grown up and preparing to move into the house with his ginger lady friend Beccy. He has been left the house in his fathers will but is unaware of its dark history. Jack Nance is still working as a caretaker at the house, he wears a bright pink T-Shirt underneath his dirty overalls. The house is the real star of the movie, doors creek eerily, bats squawk in the basement, the entire place is covered in joke shop cobwebs and there's a pentagram drawn on the floor... Cool. Despite all of this, Beccy quickly decides the house needs to be christened with a bloody good 80's mong party.

The party is a lovely celebration of all things 1985. Synth musak entertains a mass of big haired elderly teenagers. Jonathan rolls the sleeves of his grey leather jacket up above his elbows. A geek insists on talking to women in a weird high pitched toad voice. We later find out that he's a virgin. A funk synth song kicks off the worlds whitest breakdance which only ends when Mike, the lord of the dance, thinks he's busted his head. The elderly teenagers seem to really dig it. Jonathan finds a book about witchcraft and suggests that they finish the night off with a bit of a seance. The gang all file down to the basement where Jonathan inexplicably turns serious and starts reading from the book. He is not impressed when some of his chums start doing the hockey cockey half way through one of his spells. Unsurprisingly, the spell ends up being a success and unbeknownst to him or his chums he summons the shit puppets.

Jonathan claims to start work on the house whilst Beccy goes off to college but really he is busy working on his black magic skills. He turns an old tressel table into the worlds crapest altar and starts drawing pentagrams on the floor. Beccy doesn't realize there's anything strange going on until Jonathan tells her he's fasting. She's angry because she's just finished cooking dinner. She doesn't seem interested enough to ask about his sudden lifestyle choice or about why he is standing outside staring at a grave in the middle of the night. Alarm bells really start to ring when she catches Jonathan down in the basement, dressed up like a wizard and laughing his ass off because he's managed to make it rain indoors. Later he ruins a potential sex session when he starts to say a spell during some light fore play. That's about as much as Beccy can take and she leaves.

Then the really crap stuff starts. Jonathan's eyes start turning green. He creates dry ice in the basement, summons some badly dubbed midgets and the Ghoulies start to make themselves known. Considering their starring roles they really are a let down. There's a balding teddy bear with sharp teeth, a giggly rat creature with fluffy girl arms and a tiny green evil baby with a tiny six pack. Jonathan manages to arrange for the party revelers, (Beccy included) to come back to the house for a dinner party in which he insists everyone wears dark glasses at the dinner table. The Ghoulies climb out of the food but no-one seems to notice. Jonathan magics the guests down into the basement and covers them all with bedsheets before performing a ritual to resurrect his Dad from the grave. Once completed, the guests don't seem to realize that anything strange has been going on and prepare to do what anyone else would do at a party in an 80's horror movie; fucking, drinking and dieing.

The nerd tries to seduce a girl way out of his league by tickling her tummy before he is slaughtered by an army of little green ghoulies. The stud spunks into a woman and then heads downstairs for a drink, he meets an unidentified goth who seems to be interested in his penis, he exclaims "mr dick, you are a lucky guy" before she strangles him with her tongue. The breakdancing white boy gets clobbered on the head by a baseball bat wielding midget. A weird crocodile monster comes out of an evil clowns mouth and kills a girl. Beccy is so surprised by all of this death that she topples down the stair. Jonathan realizes that he has been a bit of a dick and comes over to the good side just in time to face his resurrected father.

Daddy aims to sacrifice Jonathan and creates some more dry ice and lazer effects to make this known. Before he has a chance, however, Jack Nance appears out of the blue in his own wizards costume and the pair start to strangle each other for what feels like forever. They both vanish into a ball of magic and everyone who had been killed over the previous 20 minutes of the film miraculously comes back to life and makes a run for it. Basically making the entire movie a pointless exercise. The midgets look a bit pissed off as their master drives away in a station wagon.

Mandroid

Mandroid

1993

Dir; Jack Ersgard

"Man and machine are one"

An evil doctor sends a mind controlled robot on a mini rampage in Eastern Europe

Not nearly as enjoyable as it sounds, in fact I really don't know how this film ended up being quite as dull as it did given its half decent plot and generous budget. It suffers from the fate of many of the Full Moon productions from around this time in which a cool idea which can be easily marketed to idiots like me is given a decent enough budget and produced competently but still manages to be boring as all shit. Lets not beat around the bush, I am easily pleased, usually a film featuring both a robot rampage and an evil doctor would be more than enough to engage me for 90 minutes (or, as this is a Full Moon movie and time is money, 80 minutes) but this just doesn't do it on any level.

The movie kicks off with an amazingly unsubtle rip off of the Terminator theme tune (instead of going duh duh, duh, duh duh, it goes duh duh, duh, duh, duh) which should have got Mr Band into hot water with the Governator (now that would be a good plot for Full Moons next picture, Arnie Vs Charles). The film makers treat their locations with some lovely post cold war casual racism. The film is set in the country "Eastern Europe" because apparently Americans don't realize that Eastern Europe is actually a collection of diverse countries and different cultures. Here "Eastern Europe" could be mistaken for a medieval village filled with horse and cart riding savages. It is so depressing that a muddy faced child walks through a train carriage playing a sad song on a violin. In the middle of this wasteland sits the town of Proheba where scientists are developing a new weapon, a robot which can be programmed to carry out pointlessly dangerous tasks by a human in a helmet with some wires coming out of it. The robots name is, unsurprisingly, the Mandroid.

The scientists who developed this piece of equipment are Dr Zimmer and Dr Drago with the assistance of Dr Zimmers strangely American daughter and some other bloke called Benjamin who, despite not doing much throughout this movie, was apparently important enough to the story to be given his own spin off sequel... Weird. Dr Zimmer plans to sell the Mandroid and its secret, a new type of fuel called Superconn which gives Mandroid its power, to a pair of dopey Americans. The Americans in question are scientist Wade Franklin and the CIA agent Joe Smith (come on, put some effort in Mr script writer). Unfortunately Dr Drago doesn't trust the Americans and feels that the Mandroid's secrets should be kept in Eastern Europe.

Dr Zimmer describes Mandroid as "the ultimate tool" (oh how right he is). He pointlessly sends the robot out to drive a car into a wall; it wouldn't have been that dangerous a stunt except that he was driving it in comedy fast forward. When the Americans arrive their new friends take them out for a vigorous barn dance to celebrate. Wade wears an XXL turtle neck and dances awkwardly with Dr Zimmer's daughter whilst Benjamin jealously looks on.

Dr Drago decides that he must steal the Mandroid to stop the Americans getting their fat greasy hands on it. He breaks into Dr Zimmer's lab and fills an urn up with Superconn. He pushes Benjamin into a fridge freezer but isn't able to escape before Zimmer's daughter shoots Superconn into his face. It makes Drago's face mutate into the shape of a herpes infected penis. The fridge freezer eventually makes Benjamin turn see through and later disappear all together. I'm not sure why really... Oh yeah, the sequels called "Invisible", that's right, I guess the poster had already been designed at this point.

Drago moves in with a mute homeless man and continues to plot to get Mandroid out of the hands of the Americans. Wade starts to help Dr Zimmer and becomes the new controller of Mandroid, a job previously entrusted to slowly vanishing Benjamin. When Benjamin finds out he cries into a pillow like a girl. He is then taken to hospital in the worlds crappest ambulance (basically a transit van with poorly scrawled red crosses on the back windows). Wade insists on being called Wade-droid when he is controlling the robot. They take the Mandroid out to a cave where Drago takes over the controls and brings him back to the tramps squat. Dr Drago wears a net curtain over his face to hide his penis head. He works out how to control Mandroid with just his mind. When he gets angry he slaps the tramp repeatedly and then uses his mind to make Mandroid slap him too for good measure.

Drago learns that Zimmer has a secret micro-film which contains all the secrets of Superconn. He uses Mandroid to kidnap Smith and arranges a swap; the CIA agent in exchange for the microfilm. Whilst captured, Smith proves that he is such a massive prick that he can't even get on with the mute homeless man. Dr Zimmer agrees to the swap but hires the local police force (who turn up in a fucking tank!) to come along with them. The exchange doesn't go down quite as planned and there's a bit of running around and shooting of guns. The tramp and Smith shoot each other over and over again at close range without either appearing to get hurt. Franklin shoves a metal bar in Mandroid's eye which seems to kill the invincible robot. Drago gets blown up.

Once all that shit is over and done with we come to the real reason that we're here. Benjamin is shown in hospital dressed up like the Invisible Man. Apparently the explosion didn't kill Drago because we see him getting it on with a grotesque Russian prostitute. Frankilin is in a wheelchair but has fixed Mandroid so that he can be his new legs. Why? Because as the credits role we're told that all these characters will be back in "Invisible: The Chronicles Of Benjamin Knight" another trash nugget from the Full Moon turd factory. Lets just hope something exciting happens in that one. Oh look, its ended up on my "to watch" list... Why do I do this to myself?

This movie is a characterless, action-less slow motion bore draw. Its production values are far higher than many of the movies you will see reviewed here and yet no effort appears to have been put into any aspect of the script or direction to make this enjoyable for the viewer. The video cover is way more interesting than the movie and the whole thing was clearly made as a desperate attempt to cash in on the success of the recently updated Terminator series. Mandroid aint no T1000, trust me, he looks like someone has taken a hoover apart, sprayed its contents black and stuck them onto a skin tight onezie. Its not a good look and the titular character is under used and underwhelming whenever he does pop up on screen.

The actors trudge their way through the half written plot with about as much interest as you would expect from anyone given this material. They are given characters so thin they would make an anorexic jealous. The only back story we get for Franklin is that he has recently given up smoking and as a result chews gum all the time. That's it? He's the hero of the film and that's it? It didn't make me care about his character much. But he is fully fleshed out in comparison to the others, I would probably have entirely forgotten about the character of Benjamin if I hadn't seen the advert for his spin off sequel in the credits. His story in this film is so bizarrely separate from everything else that is going on that it feels like the editors have accidentally spliced his final few scenes into the film by mistake. It just makes my mind boggle. How can a production company like Full Moon which, in comparison to most genre film makers has a great deal of experience, talent and money at their disposal, not put in enough effort to make an enjoyable movie about a killer robot? Its easy, find an interesting setting, make some shit explode, throw in a couple of memorable characters, make them explode, give the robot something to fight and make that explode too. Hell, just make some pretty people run about whilst things get set alight behind them, at least I'd be able to see where the budget went.