It is actually kind of sad how long I have been waiting to see this movie again. I remember watching it as a kid and thinking it was kinda creepy. Trying to figure out if it was funny or just “scary” was worth another look now that I am an adult.
As Ghoulies begins we see some sort of demonic ritual going on. A man (that guy from that movie/show) chanting a strange language has glowing green eyes and is about to make sacrifice to … someone. The baby he was going to kill is now tainted in some way and he sends the child off, and in his place apparently sacrifices a woman. Also, there are several strange looking hand-puppets… I mean monsters around the room, snarling and generally lurking in the dark.
Flash forward some unknown amount of time and we are again back at the house, only now it is deserted and disheveled. A “young man” Johnathan and his girlfriend Rebecca are looking over the place. Johnathan has just found out that he inherited the home and he is looking to fix it up to live in it. He and Rebecca move in and immediately Johnathan starts performing rituals of his own. Long, crappy story short, he summons up some monsters (the titular Ghoulies) and inadvertently brings a dead guy back to life. Turns out he is the baby from the opening, and he has to defend himself and Rebecca from the mistakes he just brought back from the dead.
This movie takes a LONG time to get going. Once again it is dripping with the 80’s. Hell one guy even has on those “windshield-wiper” sunglasses. Remember those? Anyway, it is horribly apparent that this movie was just trying to cash in on the tiny evil monsters fad created by the Gremlins only a year earlier. It must have worked at least partially because there were three sequels, including, no lie, Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College.
Given that the movie takes about forty-five minutes to an hour to get going, there isn’t really much to be found with in. Mariska Hargitay plays a random roll which apparently was her first, so there’s that. She also screams like no other girl in the movie. The entire cast is pretty much people that you have seen in one movie/show or another but probably none you can name (except Mariska). The Ghoulies themselves all look exactly like what they are, really bad muppets. The one on the cover confounds me because he is wearing clothes. Something that isn’t seen at all during the movie. Also though it is a clever use of the tag line and the imagery, no one actually gets it “in the end”.
Ghoulies was one of those movies I remember seeing when I was young and really wanted to see again. The problem is that I have grown up and can now see the issues that my younger self could not. It’s not really a bad movie, maybe just a bad rip off of Gremlins. Don’t let the fact there are so many sequels fool you, this one probably isn’t worth seeing again. If you saw it when you were a kid, just live in the nostalgia. Much like “The Gate” the real thing doesn’t live up to what you remember.
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