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.