Ghoulies (1985) dir. Luca Bercovici

HA! Get it? By "the end" they mean your butt! HA!

The poster art for Ghoulies terrified me as a child. The thought of a lil' green creature dude bursting out of a toilet while I might be sitting on it was pretty much the scariest thing imaginable to me for some reason. I mean, come on, that would really suck, right? You're sitting there, having a peaceful moment to yourself in the sacred silence of the bathroom and then BAM, some lil' dickhead gremlin pops up and bites your ass, or worse. Anyways, had I actually watched the movie back then I would have really saved myself a lot of troubling thoughts. There's only one lil' throwaway shot of a Ghoulie dude poppin' out of a toilet like a jack in the box. No one is even sitting on it at the time! Crisis averted!

Anyways, in the 80s, the horror movie subgenre of lil' creepers became popular. They were usually more cheeky and funny than scary, because I mean they're just lil' gross looking puppets doing stupid shit. Which, of course, totally rules.

So I was excited to finally start the Ghoulies quadrilogy after hearing bad to sorta good to utterly hilarious things about them. And to face my fears of that damn poster art!

Now let's be straight here: this first Ghoulies movie just kind of sucks. You know when you see a horror movie's runtime and it's under an hour and 20 minutes and you're like, "Sweet! Quick and dirty, let's do this." Then you watch it and you're surprised to notice that despite it's short runtime, nothing fucking happens for lenghty portions of the movie and it just drags and drags until something kinda crazy happens at the end? This is one of those flicks. It was the director's first film and boy, does it show.

There's this whole satanic cult angle to Ghoulies which I did not see coming. There are dudes with glowing green eyes (similar to the glowing blue eyes in Dune! And even crappier looking!), there's a duo of dwarf henchpeople that come out of effin' nowhere, there's a hilarious 80s party sequence with some seriously regrettable "breakdancing," and oh yeah, a handful of creepy critter shots sprinkled throughout the movie. The Ghoulies are barely in this one! They get summoned through the satanic bro, then they just kinda kick back and chill and cause some minor havoc towards the end of the movie. Then there's a HILARIOUS and inexplictably Star Wars-inspired showdown between the OG Satanic bro and the mute groundskeeper/secretly Obi-Wan Kenobi character who resembles the Grandpa from Troll 2. You simply can't make this shit up.

Obviously I came into this with my hopes set a bit too high for this sort of movie, but I'm told there is much more creature action in the sequels so I'm excited to see those, especially Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College (actual title!) Hopefully they ditch the satanic angle and just focus more on Ghoulies bein' Ghoulies.