When any kind of long running horror franchise tries to make some sort of claim that it’s going back to its roots, then it’s usually taken as a good thing. Often it leads to the newer instalments trying to be scarier, or strip back some of the extraneous baggage to try to reignite a tome that evokes the glory days of a particular series. However, when your roots include a daffy slice of mini monster satanic panic like Ghoulies, maybe going back to them isn’t as wise as you’d think – but then, no one ever accused Jim Wynorski of being wise.
In case any of you are unaware – and I’m fairly sure that’ll be most of you – the original Ghoulies was more of an EC Comics inspired tale of devil worship gone wrong that mostly sidelined it’s diminutive, rubbery creatures despite hinging it’s entire ad campaign around them in an attempt to knock off Gremlins. The sequels brought them more to the forefront where they belonged, but if you’d ever wondered what happened to the original lead character from the first film, don’t worry, the thoroughly unnecessary Ghoulies VI has your back.
Remember Jonathan Graves? No, of course not. No one does. But just in case you did, we catch up with the former college student who stumbled into becoming a practitioner of black magic around ten years later to find that, for some reason, he’s now a washed up, boozey cop in the LAPD. Essentially one of those detectives who never follows the rules, sleeps in his clothes and frequently gets into running gun battles with robbers while shopping for groceries, it seems that the days of conjuring up little green beasts are far behind him – or are they? Meet Alexandra, a leather clad femme fatal from Jonathan’s past who is working with a dark being from Hell appropriately named Faust. After once being an old flame of the disheveled cop, she’s now on a mission to obtain a jewel to free her master before his life force gives out. However, in a careless act that suggests that Alexandra is a whizz at snapping necks, but a bit of a ditz when it comes to following satanic doctrine, she not only loses the jewel, but accidently summons a pair of dwarven, jive talking demons who get up to all sorts of pointless, buddy movie antics.
With time running out, the only other jewel in this plane of existence is being worn by – you guessed it – Jonathan Graves, and so a vengful Alexandra targets her former beau by possessing partners and trying to sacrifice his hooker girlfriend. With only his tough talking ex/police chief by his side, can Jonathan manage to face the denziens of Hell and squash his darker half once and for all? And what of the mischievous demons who seemingly lack any purpose whatsoever? Will they do justice to the Ghoulie name or will their aimless pratfalling make even the gang from Ghoulies Go To College look halfway competent?
Even though I would hardly describe myself as a Ghoulie gatekeeper who demands that this ridiculous franchise be kept pure, I have to say I stayed away from completing the franchise for years primarily because I had become convinced that the fourth installment had broken some sort of sacred code. Quite why I was so adamant that ditching the classic Ghoulie characters of Fish, Cat and Rat, I’m not actually sure, but once I discovered that the use of rubbery, slime covered puppets had been dropped in favour of simply wrapping a couple of wisecracking dwarves in latex masks, I put my foot down and swore that I would never sully the memory of the Ghoulies franchise by indulging in such treachery. Of course, looking back, I obviously was talking directly out of my rear end as this is a hardly what you’d call a franchise of great renown. However, while my expectations for this final sequel were lower than worm’s belly, I have to say, there’s something about a typical Jim Wynorski romp that has me rolling my eyes in an amused sort of way.
Anyone familiar with the works of Wynorski will know that what he lacks in skill, he makes up for a self aware, camp onslaught of goofy jokes, stupid monsters and hot babes. If you’ve seen his entries in the Deathstalker or Swamp Thing franchises ( both number 2s, if you were wondering), you’ll know that the less seriously you take the film, the better – after all, it’s not like Jim himself is. Holy fuck, at one point he has Stacie Randall’s ludicrously bixom Alexandra kill two guys who are blatently supposed to be Ralph and Ed from The Honeymooners, for God’s sake.
Elsewhere, Peter Liapis may be technically returning to a character he played back in 1985, but he might as well be playing a completely different person considering he’s gone from a buttoned down student to embodying a spoof on womanising, cynical, schlubby movie cops who refuse to play by the rules, shoots up public areas with impunity and inexplicably gets all the hot chicks. I don’t know what the Hell happened to this guy between movies, but his backstory must be fucking insane.
Elsewhere, we find the usual array of clumsily staged comedy/action setpieces that seem like they’ve been written by a fifteen year old boy caught in the throes of puberty, a leather clad satanist picks off slow moving security guards with ninja stars, Barbara Alyn Woods’ police chief trades awkward sexual banter and pulls guns on a dude who accidently throws a condom on her and Jonathan’s hooker girlfriend only seems included because the sacrifices Faust demands seemingly aren’t limited to virgins.
However, curiously conspicuous by their utter lack of connection to the plot are the Ghoulies themselves who literally spend the entire film being surplus to requirements. Played by Bad Santa’s Tony Cox and Arturo Gil and billed as Ghoulie Lite and Ghoulie Dark (sic), when the pair aren’t spending the entirety of the film running around after the leads while muttering weird, comical asides, they’re chilling out reading Playmate and constantly complaining about being hungry. It’s another head scratching addition to a film that doesn’t make logical sense at the best of times and I’d be lying if I was saying that Ghoulies VI was a neglected classic. But considering what I was expecting, it turned out to be a vast improvement over the unwatchable bilge I was fully expecting when I first put it on.
OK, it ain’t no Gremlins – Holy Hell, it’s not even Ghoules 2 (arguably the best of the Ghoulies batch), but I have to say that for a film that has no real right to exist, Jim Wynorski manages to smear enough of his bone-headed, endearing style over proceedings in order to make it quite a harmless watch. Yes, there’s no puppets this time round and the script is far too fond of idiotic dad-jokes to actually string a real plot together; but as goofy trash goes, this flick is anything but the kick in the Ghoulies I thought it was going to be.
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