Ghoulies

Ghoulies

1985

Director- Luca Bercovici

Cast- Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Scott Thomson, Ralph Seymour, Mariska Hargitay, Jack Nance, Michael Des Barres, Bobbie Bresee, Keith Joe Dick

           

     The film opens with a Satanic ritual attended by cult members and the titular imps. The cult leader’s child is to be sacrificed but the ritual goes awry and the child is spared its fate. He is raised by the groundskeeper (David Lynch favorite, Jack Nance), ignorant of his father’s identity or his family legacy.

            

       Fast forward 20 or so years later and the child is all grown up and inherits his deceased father’s mansion. Pilfering around the mansion he comes upon his father’s occult tomes. Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree as Jonathan (Lipais)  pretty quickly dives head first into the occult with a lust for power including trying to surreptitiously screw his girlfriend (Pelikan) on top of a summoning circle he had drawn under their bed.

            

      He summons up a bunch of impish servants, the Ghoulies, who instruct him in the details of a ceremony to snatch him even more power. The details are a bit fuzzy but it mainly involves throwing his friends under the occult bus and making a slave of his girlfriend (what a dick, right?). The ultimate result is the return from the grave of his father. Father and son meet and dad intends to finish the ritual he had started two decades before. In a battle between evil sorcerer and creepy wanna be sorcerer, it’s hard to decide who to root for, but in the end, evil is more or less vanquished. I say more or less because the movie had three sequels.

            

      At first glance the movie appears to be a cheap rip off of Gremlins, but it really isn’t. The two films were made at roughly the same time but due to production problems, Gremlins beat it to the punch, and comparisons afterward were inevitable. These types of puppet movies were popular in the mid-80s (Critters and Troll being two similar examples along with the excellent Puppet Master series). The creatures are not really the stars of Ghoulies, but peripheral attractions. The whole thing could have been done without them and it would have been a much scarier movie. However, the film is remembered for those gross little puppets, not to mention its very memorable poster, featuring a suspendered Ghoulie climbing out of a toilet.  Watch the film as a fun distraction and as a lesson on how movies were made before CGI.