GHOULIES 3 AND 4

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Ghoulies 1 and 2 are among my favorite films. Both were spearheaded by Charles Band, perhaps one of the greatest horror filmmakers of all time. Ghoulies 3 and 4, which were only released on video and not in theaters have been mysterious to me. I’ve been curious about them for a while, but finally caught up to them.

They have become difficult to find, which is a tragedy. I found a copy of Ghoulies 3 used but apparently it is on YouTube so you can save three bucks. The nudity is edited out online; that is unfortunate, especially considering the film has a Playboy playmate in it, and a famous scene with the Ghoulies watching her in the shower.

I was a little worried about 3 and 4 because they are frequently referred to as the worst movies ever made. They’re actually not even bad. As a matter of fact, Ghoulies 4 is one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

Anytime a film is described as the worst film ever made, I end up liking it. People describe Troll 2 as the worst film ever made. I enjoyed it. Frank Zappa described The World’s Greatest Sinner as being probably the worst movie in the world even though he did the soundtrack. I enjoyed it. People call Plan 9 from Outer Space the worst film of all time. I enjoyed that as well. And so it is with Ghoulies 4. It is almost as if in order to be described as the worst film of all time, a film has to be memorable and make an impact on the individual, and as such it must have something potent about it. If a film is not just a bad movie, but rather the worst film ever, then there must be something that grabs the attention; there must be something eye opening about it. There are plenty of bad film, this I will not deny.

The post-structuralists have their fetish for two directors you’d see in the cult/horror section of an 80s video store, David Lynch and David Cronenberg. Post-structuralism is something that would come up in conversation frequently in New York, but probably never in Las Vegas, except maybe in a UNLV literature class. Las Vegas does have an arts district, but it is very small and relatively new. When I think back on people in New York and their constant references to theory in relation to Las Vegas, it is striking. In Las Vegas, no one cares. There is simply absence. Even people who view themselves as artists, a smallish portion of the population, don’t care. The post-structuralists love their Cronenberg. I like Cronenberg, but his films weren’t better then other horror films of the period. Generally, I prefer Cronenberg films from before the post-structuralists loved him. I’ll take the Brood and Scanners over the Naked Lunch film any day. I’ve also met PIs that work on cases right out of Lynch or Cronenberg but real. Post-structuralists don’t write about them or show up at PI conferences. I think Cronenberg is more interesting then post-structuralists. After all, they write about him. PIs are also more interesting then post-structuralists. Plus post-structuralist superstar Judith Butler likes gun control – it’s in her essay on the Obama election. Anyone who strongly supports gun control is my political enemy. Why do I bring this up here? Have you seen very early Lynch or very early Cronenberg? Cronenberg’s film Stereo from 1969? With the couple hippie looking actors wandering around what looks like an empty university building and the voice over of made up psychiatric jargon about the ESP experiment that supposedly is what the film footage is? That’s all it is. I’m not kidding. The Grandmother is not much better, that’s the early David Lynch short with the little boy whose abused by his parents so he plants seeds in a pile of dirt and grows a giant pod out of which a grandmother emerges to give him the love his parents don’t. I call bullshit on the post-structuralist with that - the genius of Cronenberg and Lynch. Those are fucking weak….

Ghoulies 3 and 4 are not. They are just really fucked up jokes, like the rest of the Ghoulies films. Of the Ghoulies films, 3 and 4 might be the most fucked up jokes of all. Excellent synthetic background music, an unbelievably hot female villain in an unbelievably hot latex outfit, a script with many racist jokes, a plot line that barely makes any sense, and some of the worst special effects of any film I’ve ever seen make Ghoulies 4 in particular a true gem.

Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies Go To College uses what appear to be the same puppets from the first two films, or at least puppets that look very much like them, except they talk in Ghoulies 3. Their dialogue tends towards bathroom humor and Three Stooges type bickering. It takes place during prank week at a college where two frats are having a prank war. The ghoulies cause absolute chaos, watching co-eds in the showers, wrecking stereos, stealing beers, etc. There’s a whole plotline about an evil dean of students taking control of the ghoulies through a magical comic book, but it almost seems beside the point. Ghoulies 3 has the little monsters causing absolute mayhem and delivering one-liners. If you look very carefully in the scenes with the ghoulies emerging from the toilet, you’ll see a copy of the RE/Search book Pranks, (which features people associated with the whole Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV thing like Boyd Rice and Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories) giving a nod to the role of pranks in industrial culture and performance art in the 80s. It’s a film about nefarious mischief more then anything else. Of course, for the ghoulies that means killing people. I dig the shower scene with the Playboy Playmate. It’s all so much more degrading and perverted with the presence of inhuman little beasties ogling her. Hot!

Ghoulies 4 is curious. Ghoulies 4 doesn’t even have those little three-foot-tall puppets from the first three ghoulies films. Instead, they used two midgets in latex monster masks. They also recycled footage from the first Ghoulies movie, and you can tell from the footage they recycled that the production budget on the first Ghoulies was much higher. They also made the ghoulies the good guys in Ghoulies 4, a move that I was initially weary of, but the film is actually good. They did manage to bring back the actor who played Jonathan Graves in the original Ghoulies. The original two Ghoulies movies were low-budget film legend Charles Band doing as much as he could with a couple three-foot-tall puppets. Ghoulies 4 is even more minimal. The midgets’ latex Halloween masks could very well have been from a Halloween store. I don’t mind. I find it pretty funny actually.

In 1994 when Ghoulies 4 was made, the world of rock and roll was dominated by two men. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails with his one-man-with-a-computer fully orchestrated industrial sound and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who killed himself that same year, with his heavy guitar based grunge sound. The makers of Ghoulies 4 didn’t notice. The soundtrack to their film not only has the same 80s new wave synthesizer keyboards in the background that the first three films (and other low budget 80s films ten years before) had, but they also managed to make them even more cheesy sounding somehow.

The main plotline doesn’t even involve the ghoulies; it involves a good looking woman named Alexandra (played by Stacie Randall, also in Puppet Master 4) in a very nice bondage looking outfit going around kicking people’s asses in search of a jewel that Jonathan has. The opening scene she breaks into the warehouse where another such jewel is hidden. Jonathan Graves is now a cop and he’s on the case. She communicates with a mystical being known as Faust that is also played by the same actor as Jonathan Graves. Stacie Randall’s latex top shows full cleavage the entire film. I’d fuck the shit out of a woman that looks like that. Goddamn!

There’s also plenty of racist humor in the movie. One of the ghoulies is darker in color and talks like an African American. There’s a part where he steals fried chicken out of Jonathan’s fridge. There’s a Middle Easterner working at the liquor store, also a racial stereotyped depiction. I say throw it out there; offensive movies make me laugh. It’s not quite as racist as Blackula and Blackenstein from the 70’s and I watched both of those films recently with black people who laughed at them, so I’m not going to lose sleep over laughing at the fried chicken scene in Ghoulies 4.

The plot? If you can call it such! It’s something about the character’s running around looking for a magic jewel. I was busy laughing at the black ghoulie and gawking at Stacie Randall’s latex outfit.

At the end of the movie, one of the midgets in a shitty latex mask says “Look for us in the sequel Ghoulies 4 Part 2.” Then they jump back into a portal back to their own world. No, it doesn’t make any sense and was made on a sub-puppetry special effects budget. I dig the latex outfit on Stacie Randall, the cheesed out 80s sounding electronic soundtrack years after the eighties had ended, the racist jokes and the lack of plausible or coherent plotline.

I promise you, they are more enjoyable then Stereo or The Grandmother.

- William Wheaton, May 2010

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