Movies
Ghoulies
“Wow. What a weird fucking movie. I don’t know whether to commend GHOULIES for being so bizarre, or absolutely hate on it for being the heaping pile of shit that it is. Regardless, they don’t make em’ like this anymore…”
Wow. What a weird fucking movie. I don’t know whether to commend GHOULIES for being so bizarre, or absolutely hate on it for being the heaping pile of shit that it is. Regardless, they don’t make em’ like this anymore. This is vintage 1985. At a time where studios were scrambling to get anything out that resembled GREMLINS, this is a fascinating and extremely arduous look at how trying to cash-in can go wrong real fast.
So, if my trying to block this movie out of my memory serves correctly, GHOULIES begins with a really low budget human sacrifice scene. You’ve got all of the ingredients here: a ritual leader with a horned-hat, an alter to put babies on, and a bunch of followers in white robes chanting alongside some rubber muppets. Tis true, our “ghoulies” really have no air of mystery about them. There’s no build-up to their reveal, no feeding them after midnight, they’re just sort of already on the scene. You would think the little monsters would be the most ludicrous element of this opening sequence, but you would be wrong. That honor goes to the leader of this little wannabe-cult. In most movies you try to establish the ritual leader as a supreme badass—someone all of the followers don’t want to fuck with. A guy who pulls your still-beating heart from your chest before it bursts into flames. In GHOULIES we get Michael Des Barres—one of the former lead singers of 80’s band THE POWER STATION. His hair alone demands you laugh at him. This is the same fruit basket who crooned the awesomely bad song that plays over the end credits of COMMANDO. Thanks for that Michael. Anyway, Des Barres tries to sacrifice a baby, one of his followers stops him, and Jack Nance (ERASERHEAD) shows up to take the baby to safety.
Twenty years and one Jack Nance narration later, we’re back at the same estate where the limp opening sequence happened. College student Jonathan Graves (who looks like the offspring of Kyle MacLachlan and Eric Roberts) learns he has inherited the estate and is somehow going to manage this property while having no income and an ugly girlfriend. Jonathan wants to learn about his family’s shady past, so he cleans the house repeatedly, always stumbling upon devil-worshipping relics that never seem to freak him out. In fact, he instead pulls a Jack Torrance and starts getting obsessive about his roots, so much so that he starts dressing up in the same robes as Michael Des Barres and actually gets caught “ritual-ing with himself” by his girlfriend. It’s one of the best “I’m not doing anything” moments in film history. Eventually the couple’s annoying friends come over and they party like it’s 1985, thus providing the movie with a much needed body count. Jonathan, who is way the fuck out on possessed street by this point, summons the ghoulies to pick off the characters ultimately so Michael Des Barres can come back to life and prove he can maintain his blonde, feathered hair while his face resembles one of the zombies from THRILLER.
There are many things that piss me off about GHOULIES. The effects are bad, the story is weak-sauce, the characters are unbearable, and not a whole helluva lot makes sense. Unlike the far superior efforts of GREMLINS and CRITTERS, this one really doesn’t revolve around the film’s title characters. The creatures are very much an afterthought that pop-up once in awhile to mug at the camera or bite someone’s face. The movie is more about Jonathan Graves becoming possessed, learning silly rituals and killing off his friends—which is ultimately really boring. I shit you not, at one point the douche summons two midgets straight off the set of WILLOW who then run around the rest of the film doing absolutely nothing. FX man and hack-director John Carl Buechler created the ghoulies, and he really shit the bed on their design and execution. This is the man who’s only real good work was creating the look of Jason Voorhees in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD. The puppets are uninspired and provide some of the best unintentional laughs in the movie as they try to move about and attack characters. I don’t know if there’s anything funnier than seeing a puppet fly across a shot and start biting an actor’s face. Speaking of the actors, besides Michael Des Barres and Jack Nance, fans of LAW & ORDER SVU might recognize Mariska Hargitay in the role of “Donna”… and fans of the POLICE ACADEMY films will most definitely notice Sgt. Chad Copeland (Scott Thomsen) playing an unfunny stoner here who may or may not be queer for his best friend. I read that Jeffrey Combs of RE-ANIMATOR fame auditioned for the lead. Could that casting have saved this film? Absolutely not, but it might have made the proceedings more interesting.
GHOULIES is a solid gold 1980’s turd. This is a movie that ends on a freeze-frame. You might enjoy this more with copious amounts of stimulants and a sizeable group of friends to help endure its running time. GHOULIES has somehow spawned three sequels. This particular copy I watched was coupled on an MGM DVD with part 2. I remember seeing 1 & 2 on VHS when I was younger and I remember enjoying the second one better. We’ll see if that still stands. I understand that ghoulies go to college in part 3. Jesus Christ.
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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