Sunday, October 9, 2011

CLASSICS OF CRAP: VOLUME 5-GHOULIES



Welcome back to Classics of Crap, where every week I take a look at one famously bad movie and illustrate it. This week's film is Ghoulies, a 1985 cornball witchcraft-meets-Gremlins type of movie. As a kid, I was deathly afraid of the cover art on the VHS tape, which depicted a little green bald monster popping out of the toilet with the tagline, "They'll get you in the end". For years I was terrified that these creatures would come grab me while I was relieving myself. I was a more than a little disappointed that at no time in Ghoulies does anyone get attacked while on the john. And, to add insult to injury, that Ghoulie on the cover never even wore that outfit in the film!

To think I was even afraid of this movie! It's little more than a hodgepodge of different 80's horror conventions. It borrows the scary clown from Poltergeist, a tongue attack that would feel right at home in the Thing, and much more. The villain is laughable, and fatally for the film, the Ghoulies barely do anything. They could have left them out completely and the movie would have been more or less the same. But, the film has it's merits. It's often really funny as the cast of 40 year old "teenagers" attempt to conjure occult spirits, and it has some of the wildest overacting I've ever seen on film. It's streaming on Netflix as of this writing, so you can summon up Ghoulies right now!

Afterwords, check the toilet twice for monsters, just to be sure.





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