By Geno McGahee
OK, I have to say that the GHOULIES franchise is rather good. The first three films are fun silly horror films that are not without their charm. The first two film really presented the mischievous little monsters raising hell. In the third entry, they sent the monsters to college and really hammed it up. The third film is a love or hate sort of film. I loved it, but they changed the personalities of the ghoulies and made them over the top silly. That is the pattern that GHOULIES IV has followed, but it proved not nearly as effective.
Alexandra (Stacie Randall) is running around in a spandex suit with a nice selection of weapons in her belt. Her goal is to sacrifice enough humans to bring back the evil master, but things don’t go as expected and two ghoulies make it through the portal. The ghoulies look totally different than the ones we are accustomed to. They look more like trolls. It makes it difficult to connect this film to the rest of the series. I’m not sure what the issue was, but it was probably cheaper to dress up two midgets then it was to invest in the puppetry or CGI to create the ghoulies.
We have police detective, Jonathan Graves (Peter Liapis), a guy with a dark past and a stone hanging around his neck that is very powerful. He is on the case and finds himself dealing with the problems of the city that aren’t so paranormal, including a convenient store holdup. He has a goofy partner, Scott (Bobby Di Cicco), that does more harm than good in every situation. Although funny at times, this is where the film begins to hurt itself. It tries too hard to be funny.
At one point, we have two idiots pretending to be Jackie Gleason and Art Carney from THE HONEYMOONERS. Thankfully, they kill them off quickly, but it’s an example of the filmmakers trying to be funny too hard. At times, they find some comedic traction, but there is more of this over the top, in your face, “we’re being funny” attempts that it gets annoying and hard to watch.
Kate (Barbara Alyn Woods), the captain, is attempting to sort everything out and is shadowing Graves and his progress. She begins to unravel the connection between Graves and the problem that the city is having. One of the things in the favor of this movie is trying to connect it to the first by bringing back the character of Graves with the original actor. It’s not done very well, but at least they tried to put something in there that would make it feel like one of the GHOULIE movies.
A battle at the end, including another attempted sacrifice, leads to the truth about Graves and the return of Faust, the evil lord. We also find out why that gem around the neck of Graves is so important. When it ended, my reaction wasn’t really a reaction at all. There isn’t much to this movie and there is so much unnecessary filler that the filmmakers probably struggled to make this feature length. The writer, Mark Sevi, has a history of making straight to video sequels and had nothing to do with the first three GHOULIES movies. He was brought in strictly to write something that they could sell and the title still had name value.
The director, Jim Wynorski, is known for the B movie and making intentionally bad films like THE BARE WENCH PROJECT and 976-EVIL II, but to his credit, he did direct CHOPPING MALL, proving he can bring it when he has a project that is serious. GHOULIES IV was written to be stupid and it lived up to it.
GHOULIES IV tries way too hard to be funny. Every time that I saw the two ghoulies on the screen, I kept thinking about THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE. They had that vibe. Even though we have the connection of Graves in this film, it is difficult to accept it as a Ghoulies movie without the known characters established in the other three. I still enjoyed this film to a certain extent, but if they focused a little more and paid more attention to the humor that made the first three charming, we could have had a great wrap up to the series.
In the end, I will recommend this for those that like the GHOULIES series just because of the slight connection. It badly pales in comparison but I’ve seen worse. Is that a good review for a film? I’ve seen worse? That may be the best thing that I can say about this one. I have seen worse.
Rating: 3/10
READ THE REVIEW FOR GHOULIES 1-3 – CLICK HERE!
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