Not that anyone will be impressed, but the perpetrators of GHOULIES IV ignore the last few sequels, outright GREMLINS rip-offs, and go back to 1985's original GHOULIES, in which the title creatures were just background to a story about young Jonathan Graves (Peter Liapis) seeking to become
an all-powerful wizard. Now, eight years later, Graves has given up the occult to become another bad-movie stereotype, an unstoppable cop. But Alexandra (Stacie Randall), an old Satanist flame of his, has escaped the asylum and is sacrificing folks all over LA to invoke an evil spirit, actually
Graves' darker self. Finally the hero's off-and-on girlfriend, sexy LAPD Capt. Kate Farr (Barbara Alyn Woods) uses a handy magic crystal to banish the baddies to hell.
It's a comedy, by the way. Director Jim Wynorski owes his career to the conjunction of home video, bad sequels, and Roger Corman; among the cheap, gag-filled followups he's done for Corman and others are BEASTMASTER 2, 976-EVIL II, and THE RETURN OF SWAMP THING. GHOULIES IV contains the usual
Wynorski quota of smarmy in-jokes and insipid parodies (a pair of "Honeymooners" lookalikes as sewer workers is one of the better ones); perhaps because of the flippant tone, one is supposed to ignore the fact that none of the good-looking cast in the least resemble the streetwise police,
prostitutes, and punks they're supposed to be. Liapis in particular hasn't a clue how to play a guy who's so tough that he broke the squad car radio so no one can ever call for backup. At least Randall, clad in a revealing dominatrix outfit throughout, reveals some spunk along with a lot of
cleavage.
So where are the ghoulies? Once again they're just a sideshow--two pitifully unfunny, jive-talking trolls who pop in and out of the scenery, barely interacting with the main characters, hardly even able to get the lips of their masks to twitch in sync with their stupid banter. At the end they
promise to be back in "Ghoulies IV Part 2." (Violence, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment