Review: Hobgoblins (1988)
Directed by: Rick Sloane
Starring: Tom Bartlett, Paige Sullivan, Steven Boggs
Written by: Rick Sloane
Music by: Alan DerMarderosian
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Vinegar Syndrome)
IMDb
There exists a continuum of “small monster movies,” that batch of horror flicks that emerged in the ‘80s, focused on sometimes adorable but often mischievous or bloodthirsty creatures of diminutive stature. On one end of this continuum is Joe Dante’s beloved Gremlins (1984). Somewhere in the mushy middle falls stuff like Ghoulies (1984), Critters (1986), and Munchies (1987). At the other, much shittier end is Rick Sloane’s Hobgoblins, about a handful of poorly designed skinned guinea pigs with the articulation of lawn ornaments that crash-land on earth and use people’s wildest fantasies against them — to death!
It opens with a scene that’s so fucking confusing that I had to use another precious 5 minutes to watch again just to make sure I wasn’t slipping into cognitive decline. There’s an old security guard and a young security guard and they’re at a place with lots of concrete and metal handrails and bars that requires guarding. Is it a prison? Is it a high school? Who knows? Sloane eventually tells you it’s an abandoned movie studio, but not until like 15 minutes later, when you’ve stopped caring about details that don’t matter. Anyway, the young guard, accompanied by ever-ominous music, wanders into a giant vault, where he hears some snarls and then stumbles on a stage with a microphone stand. Spotlights flip on and suddenly he’s doing an awful impersonation of a rock star, like Mick Jagger as a spastic mime. He loses his balance and tumbles the 3 feet off the stage and bleeds to death for some reason. And then HOBGOBLINS! pounces in front of your already w(e)ary eyes.
In the style of the poorly crafted opening, there is non-sequitous bullshit aplenty here, of varying degrees of banality. Want to watch two dorks battle like gardening tool-wielding gladiators on someone’s front lawn, in a show of masculinity that lasts 5 goddamn minutes? Rick Sloane, obviously an auteur of the highest order, has you covered. Sure, Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs in Basic Instinct was pretty hot. But have you seen multiple sex scenes shot from outside a rocking minivan that makes a cartoon “BOING!” noise with each sex swivel? I’m ready to copulate just thinking about it again. Sloane eschews your typical crowd-pleasing car chases and instead goes with multiple sequences of the septuagenarian security guard doing a bow-legged shuffle to a variety of locations at his highest speed, which is quite slow. He gives an enthusiastic go-ahead to the in-movie band to play a full song from its third-rate Joy Division catalog, to eat up maximum screen time. The screenplay is super-obsessed with sex but in a 30-year-old virgin sort of way that never approaches actual sex or nudity, and you get the feeling Sloane doesn’t understand any of the actual mechanics of sexual intercourse. He definitely had access to a library of sound effects from the Looney Tunes library and made damn sure to get full use out of it in every situation, no matter how inappropriate.
Hobgoblins is the type of trend-hop that arrives to the party super late — as the hosts are trying to shoo out the last, drunken morons so they can finally get some sleep — already well on its way to blitzville, with cheap hard lemonade no one will ever drink. This is such a lazy, goofy attempt at a direct-to-video cash grab that I almost gave up on it, which I rarely do. But as it continued on, doing its ludicrously cheap impersonation of an actual movie, I started to settle on its wavelength a bit. This is a movie made by people that embody “DGAF” to a nearly admirable degree. Boom mics in frame? Puppetry rods easily visible? Three-foot-tall creatures nearly always eye-to-eye with the actors in shared scenes? Actors peering off-screen at cue cards? Near-total neglect in providing context or establishing shots? D.G.A.F. IMDb tells me this thing was filmed in a week with $15,000 and no permits, and that checks out. IMDb also informs me the shooting location was next to a crack house and the hobgoblins were operated by a woman who had just been released from a mental hospital. This also checks out.
Overall rating: 5 out of 10
