It Came From Netflix Streaming: Ghoulies (1985)

It Came From Netflix Streaming
Ghoulies (1985)

By: Bill Brock

Occasionally, I like to imagine what 80s me would think of current technology.  I can see myself explaining to 80s me about streaming technology.  80s me, who has just recently become accustomed to this new VHS thing and may own a TRS-80, stares at current me in disbelief.  What the heck is this internet?  Does streaming involve knowledge of BASIC or COBOL?  Aren’t these suede Pumas awesome?  My jacket was $50 and is for members only, bitch!  80s me then asks current me to sit down in front of the console TV and watch Ghoulies.  Current me figures what the Hell I haven’t seen Ghoulies in 25 years and pulls up a bean bag.

Ghoulies is a bait and switch movie.  It positions itself as a bit of a Gremlins knockoff even though the titular Ghoulies have little to nothing to do with plot.  It’s like The Matrix calling itself Sentinels: The Movie.  A more honest title for Ghoulies would be The World’s Oldest College Dude Performs Magic.

The movie opens with a confused cult dressed in white robes going through the motions of a possible Satanic ritual.  There are pentagrams and something that looks like a DM’s map of that night’s  Dungeons and Dragons campaign so if Rona Jaffe is to be believed it’s satanic.  The cult leader is played by Michael De Barres, a guy who was Moriarty to MacGyver’s Holmes and was once married to “famous” book writing groupie Pamela Des Barres.   Evil leader guy pulls out a baby to sacrifice and the baby’s mama decides that maybe this is pushing the evil satanic cult thing too far.  She puts a necklace on the baby which prevents it from being sacrificed and apparently can’t be removed.  The baby is handed off to another cult member who takes it outside and does something with him.  The movie can’t be bothered to explain what exactly.  I’ll assume he was given to a nice family.

25 years later the all grown up baby inherits the house and arrives with his girlfriend.  He’s apparently a college student because he is wearing a letter sweater.  I say apparently because he looks to be in his 30s.  They meet the caretaker who doesn’t actually talk to them but looks vaguely familiar.  The caretaker gives a bit of voice over here and there throughout the movie.   I believe the first V.O. provided explains that evil cult leader is now dead and maybe the curse won’t affect the “kid”.  As it turns out the caretaker is the guy who carried the baby out at the beginning.  For a guy who doesn’t want the curse to get the kid he sure can’t be bothered to clean the house of all the cult books and paraphernalia.  They throw a party that night and we are introduced to other far too old to be college student college students.  

Well the world’s oldest college student/eventual magic user decides to drop out for a quarter and fix up the house.  I sat there waiting for the doing stuff 80s montage set to a song that would never get airplay and it never happened.  What the fuck, movie?  It’s the 80s dammit.  I expect a montage and you cheat me out of it.  Fine, I’m listening to “You’re the Best” from Karate Kid right now.  Screw you Ghoulies.

The guy gets deeper and deeper into the magic and summons the Ghoulies which are possibly the cheapest puppets imaginable and some midgets who do, well, not much of anything beyond being midgets.  Hmmm, unfunny and terrible puppets.  Ghoulies is also indirectly responsible for Jeff Dunham.  Fuck you again, movie.

Since it is the 80s, he throws a dinner party where everyone has to wear goofy sunglasses.  Somewhere along the way cult leader from the beginning is resurrected and wants to kill the former baby to steal his life force and, maybe, become young again.  The ghoulies fail to do much beyond kill a person or two.  The movie takes a few moments to knock off Poltergeist with this clown doll thing.  And the caretaker guy is inexplicably a bad ass mage because someone has to kill Des Barres again.  I would say the business with the dead friends knocks off April Fool’s Day but that didn’t come out until a year later.  We are finally treated to a bit of sequel-baiting.

I’ve never really been much for nostalgia.  It always bites you in the ass.  Not that I was ever all that nostalgic for Ghoulies or its many sequels.  But, what do we really have here?  Ghoulies ultimately is a movie about a guy who uses magic and shit happens.  There also happens to be some terrible puppets.  I’m guessing that Charles Band saw Gremlins and decided to pretend that the Ghoulies were more important to the plot than they really are and sold the movie based on them.  The later movies probably did feature them more.  To be honest I really don’t remember any of the other ones.  Perhaps I went back in time and told 80s me not to bother.

Should you watch this?  No.  It fails to engage even on a so bad it is good level.

It Came From Netflix Streaming: Dead Snow, The Horde, and Zombies: A Double Feature

What is a zombie and what is with the resurge of interest in them?  Well, a zombie is a reanimated corpse that inexplicably wants to eat people.  That’s was easy enough to answer.  I’m so proud of myself right now I’m going to go high-five somebody and have a celebratory cigarette.  
 
As for the other half of the question, well, that’s going to be a bit harder.
 
The earliest, chronologically, movie that I saw that touched on the modern idea of zombies was Plan 9 From Outer Space, wherein, aliens decided to take over the world by reanimating a couple of dead people in a small town in the middle of nowhere.  Spoiler alert:  It doesn’t really work all that well.  While there wasn’t much by way of people eating and they were more the skulking and carrying off women that fainted from fright type of reanimated corpses still they were still reanimated corpses, nonetheless.
 
It wasn’t until Romero made a little movie called Night of the Living Dead that the modern zombie was given birth.  Night is kind of a Portrait of Dorian Gray type of movie were every year the picture ages a bit more horribly until, eventually, it becomes unwatchable.  On the off chance that Romero sees this, can you please go back and take that goddamned cricket out of the soundtrack?  Please?  A cricket really isn’t the ambient sound one needs in a movie where very little happens.  While Night was profitable, its influence led small studios to just make low budget horror movies.  There’s a pretty good chance we’d never have a Chain Saw Massacre or a Halloween without it.
 
In 1978 Romero made the greatest zombie movie that had the worst repercussions of all time.  Dawn of the Dead was epic.  While I could never work out who built the mall what with all the zombies that had been roaming about biting people since 1968, still it was epic.  The major problem with Dawn is that it showed every Italian with a camera, a few rolls of film, some fake blood, sausage links and those cheap Halloween kits that they could also make a zombie movie.  They were even cost effective, zombies don’t talk and extras who don’t talk make very little money.   It seemed at the time there was a cheap zombie movie released weekly each promising to show the audience some fucked up shit.  What audiences mostly got was bad dubbing and one or two zombies killing folks with terrible F/X.  This is considered the Golden Age of Zombies.  Golden Age of Mostly Shit, if you ask me.  Over the years there has been the occasional good zombie movie (Return of the Living Dead being about the best of the lot).  The best and worst things to happen to zombies were yet to come.
Back in the 60s while hippies were convincing themselves that drugs and fucking were changing the world for the better, some nerds created the Internet and actually managed to change the world on nothing but Mountain Dew and furious masturbation.  The commoditization of the internet and Hollywood’s increasing fears of losing money by actually making movies formed a perfect storm for the current zombie renaissance.  
 
Zombies, in modern culture, are an odd thing.  They seem to be liked or loved by all walks of life.  People who don’t even like horror, namely people who see the current crop of PG-13 J horror remakes and found footage nonsense, will squeal like little girls with a new unicorn pony at the very mention of them.  But why?  Zombies aren’t terribly interesting in and of themselves.  They are walking bodies that eat people.  They have no personality or discernable goals, regardless of how hard Romero has tried to shoehorn some in over the past few years.  
 
My pet theory is that zombies represent our fascination with viruses and how they spread.  In most movies that have bothered with an explanation of them zombies are caused by a virus.  Zombies present a macroscopic view of the microscopic process of viral spread and reproduction.  A person is infected and its only real desire is to bite others to spread it around.  I realize that most movies have them tear folks apart and eat them but to what purpose?  Their internal organs no longer work and they have no real need for sustenance.  Think of it as the virus controlling the person who is limited to basic brain functions and you probably come pretty close to the truth of it.
 
My 2 cents, anyways.  I hear that other like them because “they  r kool and shit lol”.
 
The movies I watched this week just happen to have zombies and one of the two actually gave the zombies a bit of motivation.  I’m, of course, talking about Dead Snow and The Horde.
 
Dead Snow involves a bunch of Swedes—They’re Norwegian, MacReady—heading to a cabin in some out of the way place and having bad shit happen to them.  
 
The movie starts with a girl running from something as ironic classical music plays in the background.  Oh Edvard Grieg how far you’ve come.  She is promptly killed and we head into what looks suspiciously like the opening to The Shining.  We meet our soon to be dead folks as they talk about seemingly inconsequential things like avalanches and one of the guys being a med student who is disgusted by blood.  Both topics come into play later although the avalanche thing is used by a person in the other car.  Guess she has great hearing or something.
 
They arrive at the cabin and have some fun in the snow and play twister and listen to terrible Norwegian music.  Shortly after they are visited by Old Man Exposition who insults the coffee, steals a beer, lights up a smoke and provides pages of back story.  Some Nazis in the area generally acted like assholes and were chased off by the local villagers.  After he explains everything he buggers off back to his tent and gets killed.  
 
We continue with the slow build up which is code for shit fails to happen.  Two people fuck in an outhouse which is possibly the least sexy place one could possibly fuck.  If you’ve never been to a particularly rural place and have no idea what an outhouse is just replace it with a port-a-potty that’s been in use for a week and the honey wagon hasn’t been around to pump out the shit.  
 
While those guys are having at it, the folks inside find a small chest of gold and have fun with it.  The movie then becomes Leprechaun.  
 
The Nazi zombies in the movie aren’t traditional zombies.  I’ve seen slow and fast zombies, this is the first movie with supersonic zombies.  I thought for a while that it would paint itself in the same corner as Alien3 where any chase scene becomes pointless because no one can outrun them.  Thankfully, the Nazi zombies suffer from Phantom Menace disease and can only run fast when the plot demands it.  It’s never explained why they want the gold back.  I can’t imagine them moseying into town to buy anything.  
 
Well the zombies attack folks to regain their pot o’ gold.  There’s blood and gore and whatnot.  People die.  Nazi zombies re-die.  The last 20 minutes or so finally manage to entertain despite the relentless silliness of it all.
If you haven’t watched it I recommend it.  Just be ready to fast forward a bit.
 
The Horde is a French zombie movie where zombies happen to attack a tenement building while some cops try to kill some other people for some reason or the other.  It’s French so I’m guessing existentialism or a disregard for Jerry Lewis enters into it somewhere.
 
We open on a funeral for someone.  I’m guessing he was important ‘cause some friends of his decide to go kill the guy who killed him.  I guess you could say they form an Alliance and are in Thrall to one another.  A Stormwind seems to blow in the Forsaken zombies.  Yes, I played WoW.  Now shut the fuck up about it.
The four cops decide to storm the tenement building where the Nigerians who killed funeral guy live.  They do so in that really conspicuous way that little kids play spy.  While sneaking about the maintenance guy gets the drop on them.  So yeah they really really suck at being sneaky.  The Nigerians take a break from sending spam emails and shoot at the cops who get snuck up on a second time by maintenance guy.
 
So the Nigerians capture the cops and shoot some unrelated guy to prove that they are BAMFs.  Then kill one of the cops to reiterate their BAMFness.  Then Hell breaks loose.
 
Zombies converge on the building for no apparent reason and the first guy the Nigerians killed starts beating on the door.  They, of course, open the door and proceed to empty all their bullets into his chest.  This, unsurprisingly, proves ineffective so a couple of lackeys decide to go hand to hand, also ineffective.  The main Nigerian wanders over and shoots the guy in the head finally putting him down.  No one really learns from this though.  Throughout the movie approximately 4,000 shots are fired.  Maybe 2 are head shots.  Well there is the scene where one of the cops sacrifices himself and goes on a head shot rampage but by that point it really doesn’t matter.
 
The escape from the building is full of nonsense.  There’s more hand to hand fighting, an old crazy racist French guy, a few guys seriously considering fucking a zombie chick and the introduction of a concept wherein zombies store food for later.  It’s all patently ridiculous in its blatant attempts at “coolness”.
 
Should you watch this one?  No.  But you crazy kids love your zombies and probably will anyways.  

 

It Came From Netflix Streaming: Uncle Sam (1997)

Slasher films and holidays go together like chocolate and peanut butter.  It gives the makers of such films two easy starting points in their creation.  On the one hand holidays have built in name recognition.  “There’s a movie called Happy Birthday to Me!  Why I have birthdays!  I must go see it!”  On the other, it gives them an easy to explain back story and motivation for the slasher.  His mother was killed on Christmas by a dude in a Santa suit so he must now don a Santa suit and kill folks.  Of course, by now, most of the good holidays have been used ad naseum.  So, what’s a poor film maker to do? 

This brings us to Uncle Sam, the first horror movie, not involving aliens or Tom Cruises, to take place on the 4th of July.  

Our film begins in Kuwait, where random army guys find a chopper shot down by friendly fire.  In the chopper is a guy lucky enough to be named Sam and have a nephew.  He is also a rather spry dead guy who shoots the guys who find him.  I’m guessing the army sent more guys out and those guys weren’t at all put off by the first set of guys being shot, because…

Next we head to Small Town, USA a few days before the 4th of July.  Sam’s nephew has a room full of military related stuff, because he rather liked his uncle, Sam.  The kid may or may not be having a bad dream and knocks over a photo of Sam and promptly steps on the glass.  The kid’s blood has better self- control than an alien-infected guy’s in Antarctica.

A brief interlude about the kid:  It’s said that Disney has a cloning facility where they make perfect clones to star on their T.V. shows and sing terrible songs and generally just part tweens from their cash.  I imagine it as a sterile state of the art facility with a really nice cafeteria.  There is also a dilapidated factory on the seamier side of town that grows fairly hideous B-movie kids.  This kid and the kid from Troll 2 look to have been grown in the same vat.  End of interlude.

So anyways, the kid really loved his uncle and wants to be like him.  It a not-so-shocking twist later is turns out that Sam was –spoiler alert- an abusive asshole.  Yeah, I know, shocking.  He takes Sam’s medals to school for a bit of impromptu show and tell.  His teacher, a former conscientious objector, gets called a coward and somehow doesn’t smack the kid.  The teacher, it should be noted, is played by Timothy Bottoms.  Bottoms was on the short lived show “That’s My Bush” where he was George W. Bush.  Yeah, “suck it future draft dodging former president,” says the film makers in an oddly psychic moment.  

A military guy delivers Sam’s body straight to his sister-in-law’s house and puts the coffin right there in the living room.  No one seems to be terribly sad about the death or in any hurry to arrange a funeral.  I guess the coffin really ties the room together.  The kid loosens 1 of the locks on the coffin.  Not all, mind you.  Just one.  But it proves to be enough to allow Sam to exit later.  So that’s alright.

Sam is resurrected by some asshole teens who practice their constitutionally protected right to burn an American flag right over his freshly dug grave replete with a tombstone.  So, I suppose, the widow did make some hasty arrangements while nothing  was happening, which in this movie could have been at any time.

Meanwhile, across town, a guy on stilts and in an Uncle Sam outfit decides to do what comes naturally; stares at tits on the second story of a house.  Well, either that doesn’t sit well with zombie Sam or he just needs the outfit.  He kills him and steals his outfit.  Staring at tits is as American as apple pie and baseball.  I'm sure the Founding Fathers, if not for the 20 layers of clothes that women wore and general lack of porn, loved tits as well and would have stared at them if given a chance.

This leads me to my next major issue.  Slasher villains have to follow certain rules.  This is what defines them.  Sam ostensibly kills people for being unpatriotic.  As the film goes on he tends to lose his focus and kills people for dating his widow or cutting ribs poorly.  

The big July 4th celebration begins.  Sam stalks around killing a kid who sings the National Anthem poorly, a shady politician and several other people like the above mentioned girl who seems less than enthused about preparing ribs.  

A burned, blind, crippled kid is introduced.  He looks suspiciously like the kid who is the ½ in 2 and ½ Men after a particularly vicious burn from Charlie Sheen.  What does he do in the movie other than demonstrate the dangers of fireworks?  Nothing.   His parents are played by P. J. Soles and Thom McFadden.  Oh look!  People from Halloween and 976-Evil are in this!  Get a camera.

Burned kid get talked to and creepily touched by Sam.  Why?   The burned kid and the creepy kid are friends.  How does Sam know this?  No idea.  It probably doesn’t matter.   Burned kid tells creepy kid that his uncle is skulking about.  So the kids seek the aid of Isaac Hayes to kill Sam.  Isaac Hayes and Sam have some sort of past.  We learn this by a quickly glimpsed present given to Hayes, a pair of balls in a rather nice case with a note suggesting that Hayes lacks balls.  Hayes and the kids find Sam and kill him with a cannon of all things. 

 The kid decides that maybe the military isn’t for him, because they produce evil zombie killers or something, and throws away his toys at the end.  The movie can’t even be bothered to sequel bait.  

Should you watch this?  Probably not.  But it will make you feel as if you are getting your $15 per month’s worth out of Netflix.