Though it’s often remembered as one of the many Gremlins rip-offs of the ‘80s, Ghoulies has its origins in 1983 (or a year before Gremlins hit screens), when producer Charles Band and creature effects guru Stan Winston dreamed up a film called Beasties about a bunch of small creatures wreaking havoc on a group of young people. It underwent some changes on the way to the screen: rather than Band directing as originally planned, the film would be helmed by actor Luca Bercovici, who had previously worked for Band on 1982’s Parasite. Stan Winston would not design the creatures, either; those duties fell to John Carl Buechler. And despite what its title might suggest, there wouldn’t end up being very many ghoulies in Ghoulies.
Instead, the 1984 film focuses mainly on a man (Peter Liapis) who inherits a mansion from his father (rocker Richard Des Barres) and ends up conjuring demonic forces that threaten his relationship with girlfriend Rebecca (Lisa Pelikan). When his friends show up for a party — among them Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Scott Thomson and a pre-SVU Mariska Hargitay — they are attacked by slimy little monsters and the return of a resurrected warlock.
There was a trend in ‘80s horror movies in which young people conjured up forces beyond their understanding and wound up paying the price — it’s there in everything from Witchboard to Trick or Treat. They play like cautionary tales for kids to stay away from heavy metal or sexuality or whatever it was that ‘80s teenagers investigated as a means of expressing independent thought. For as much as many of us ‘80s kids remember Ghoulies as being a tiny-creatures-on-the-loose movie (that indelible poster image of a ghoulie popping out of a toilet forever burned in our brains), it’s much more a movie in that tradition: young people mess with demonic forces and those forces mess back in a big, bad way. Unfortunately, those demonic forces (which do eventually include the ghoulies) take forever to show up and are rushed when they do. While Ghoulies is fun in an ‘80s PG-13 horror kind of way — the type of movie that played on HBO a whole lot during the decade — it’s a hard movie to love. Its importance as a movie has more to do with its place in the success of Empire Pictures, the studio Band owned and ran in the ‘80s and which would eventually give way to his Full Moon Features. The film’s enormous success gave Band the capital to fund dozens more films in the decade, and if you love those old Empire movies as much as I do, that fact has to be appreciated.
The first of Ghoulies’ three sequels, 1988’s Ghoulies II, is included as the second feature on Scream Factory’s new double feature Blu-ray. It does a much better job of delivering on the promise of the first film by actually using the little monsters as the primary menace and putting them in the movie a whole lot. This time around, the ghoulies take over an amusement park run by Royal Dano (The Dark Half) with deadly results. Directing duties on the sequel fell to Albert Band, father of producer Charles Band, who knows his way around enthusiastic schlock like this.
Ghoulies II benefits from loftier ambitions — lots of monsters (and different kinds, too, including one giant ghoulie in the climax) and bigger production values thanks to the fully functioning carnival Band had built on a soundstage at Empire’s Italian studio. It’s got a higher body count and some surprisingly nasty violence (trimmed for a PG-13, though not so as you’d know it). It may have the lesser reputation, but is actually the more entertaining of the two movies. The monsters chew people up and are made to be part of silly gags, making Ghoulies II much more of a Gremlins rip-off than the first movie ever was. There are some fun stop motion effects courtesy of frequent Band collaborator Dave Allen, and while Richard Band’s charming score from the first film is missed, at least it’s replaced with a theme song by W.A.S.P. That’s the kind of movie Ghoulies II is: tacky and none too subtle, but a surprising amount of lively fun.
The next in a steady growing line of Empire pictures brought to Blu-ray by Scream Factory (a list that also includes Prison, From Beyond, TerrorVision and their upcoming release of Robot Jox), Ghoulies and Ghoulies II fare decently on Blu-ray. Neither the 1080p high def video nor the lossless audio tracks (both 5.1 and stereo options) are exemplary for the format, but they get the job done. The 30-minute Ghoulies retrospective documentary that kicks off the bonus features focuses less on the actual production of the movie (though there are some brief anecdotes) and more on its place in history. Band himself chalks much of the film’s success to its memorable ad campaign, which featured a ghoulie popping out of a toilet with copy that read “They’ll get you in the end!” He tells the story of how that campaign came together and its impact; if you’ve ever heard Band speak at one of his Full Moon Roadshows, you already know it.
Also included in the supplemental section for Ghoulies is the original trailer and a commentary track by actor-turned-director (and co-writer) Luca Bercovici, which starts strong but quickly grows silent for majority of the remaining running time. Ghoulies II gets its own retrospective that focuses much more on the production but which features only a few participants, as well as the original trailer and the deleted moments of additional gore excised to get the movie a PG-13 rating.
As a fan of Empire Pictures, I’m happy as heck to have Ghoulies on Blu-ray, though it’s hard to defend any affection for the film on grounds other than nostalgia. The real surprise of the disc is Ghoulies II, which has aged better and is far more entertaining than it has any real right to be. Both films are a testament to Charles Band’s ability to stretch a dollar and come up with great marketing hooks. Without that famous poster, we probably wouldn’t be talking about Ghoulies more than 30 years later. I guess they really did get us in the end.
Ghoulies Movie Score: 2.5/5
Ghoulies II Movie Score: 3/5
Disc Score: 3/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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