Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
I haven’t done the math, but it’s within the realm of possibility that you could fill out an entire Bottom 100 list made up of nothing but Gremlins knockoffs. There have been at least four Critters movies, four installments of Ghoulies and a trilogy of Munchies, as well as lesser-known attempts like Beasties, Spookies and Kamillions. And then there’s our topic for today, 1988’s Hobgoblins.
I’ll admit to being unfamiliar with the work of writer/director Rick Sloane before now, and based on the evidence onscreen in Hobgoblins I would have been willing to bet it was his first and only movie-making effort. But I would have lost that bet. By the time he made Hobgoblins, Sloane already had several horror shows under his belt, including Movie House Massacre and The Visitants, which has a catchy title if nothing else. He is also responsible for six, count ‘em six installments of the Vice Academy series, which presumably bears the same resemblance to the Police Academy collective as Hobgoblins does to Gremlins: a smudgy, degraded Xerox of the original.
McCreedy, an elderly security guard at an abandoned Hollywood studio lot, is having trouble finding a reliable assistant. It seems everyone he hires ignores his warnings to stay away from the vault, despite the often fatal consequences of setting foot inside of it. He finally seems to have a worthy successor in Kevin (Tom Bartlett), a mild-mannered fellow whose frigid girlfriend Amy (Paige Sullivan) is constantly berating him for his lack of manliness. In his attempts at foiling a burglary, Kevin does indeed enter the vault, accidentally freeing its inhabitants, the titular hobgoblins. As McCreedy explains, the little critters arrived 30 years earlier in a tiny spaceship and virtually destroyed the studio with their other-worldly abilities. The hobgoblins have the power to make your wildest fantasy come to life, but in true “be careful what you wish for” fashion, the end result is deadly – except when it’s not, which is unfortunately too often the case here.
We’ve all heard of doing more with less, but somehow Sloane has managed to do less with less; if he spent any more on Hobgoblins than I spent on lunch today, he didn’t get his money’s worth. The creatures themselves appear to be Gremlins puppets straight from the Toys R Us shelves, the grand total of three locations are underdressed and underlit, and the apartment when Kevin and his friends hang out looks distressingly like a place I used to live in North Hollywood. (I know I shouldn’t hold that against the movie, but I’m only human.) I’m not suggesting that Sloane set out to make a bad movie on purpose…just that he was aiming low and didn’t quite hit the mark. There’s a spoofy, Troma-like sensibility to the proceedings, including a very silly and pointless rake battle between Kevin and the Army-trained boyfriend of his friend Daphne, a slutty Cyndi Lauper fashion victim. The only remotely endearing character in the movie is Pixie, the beehive-haired waitress/go-go dancer in the endless Club Scum sequence that more or less serves as the movie’s climax.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Hobgoblins – for all I know, everyone had fun making it and nobody got hurt. Perhaps I should be more forgiving of the low budget, even though wit doesn’t cost anything (yet can be very hard to find). But…wait! What’s this at the top of Rick Sloane’s IMDb page? It’s…it’s…(choke) Hobgoblins 2, scheduled for release later this year. Please excuse my fleeting magnanimousness.
Previously on Unwatchable:
87. The Sidehackers
88. College Road Trip (pending)
89. Bloodlust!
90. The Bat People
91. Horrors of Spider Island