Cast: Tom Bartlett, Paige Sullivan, Steven Boggs, Kelley Palmer, Billy Frank
Director: Rick Sloane
Genre: Comedy, Horror
The next movie on our list is Hobgoblins (1988) which was featured on MST3K and in my opinion, is one of the funniest MST3K episodes ever made!
Hobgoblins was written and directed by Rick Sloane, a man who
has a habit for producing cheesy low-budget movies usually featuring big
breasted ladies and not a lot of plot. In
fact it was another movie of Sloane’s, Vice Academy, (1989), which was going to
be riffed by the MST3K guys but there was not enough material to work
with. It was actually Sloane himself
which suggested they used Hobgoblins instead and the rest is comedy history!
I like the fact Sloane recognises that this is a bad movie
and yes he may have just been looking to gain publicity from it, but I thank
him for giving the MST3K guys the heads up.
It’s a refreshing change to go into a movie knowing full
well what to expect; Hobgoblins is a bad movie which was a shameless attempt to
cash in on the popular Gremlins franchise and is truly awful. But at least it’s incredibly funny.
Or is it?
Actually, when I came to think of it, I realised that I had
actually never seen the original movie.
This led me to the question ‘was it the MST3K guys who made this movie
funny or, as I first thought, is it so ridiculously bad that it becomes good?’.
Dithering old security guard, Mr. McCreedy, (Jeffrey
Culver), works in an old movie studio and is showing Dennis, (Kevin Kildow),
the ropes. When Mr. McCreedy is called
by his boss, Dennis decides to take a wander around and finds the film
vault. Inside is an old stage and Dennis
does what every mature, intelligent, sensible man would do and jumps on stage,
grabs a microphone and proceeds to perform as the bastard son of Freddie Mercury
and Michael Jackson.
Someone or something does not seem to like his act and
proceeds to kill him, (a type of voting I would like to see in Britain’s Got
Talent or X-Factor). When Mr. McCreedy
discovers the body, he does what every good law abiding citizen would do,
closes the door, walks away and never mentions it again.
This leaves the door open for the next victim trainee
security guard, Kevin, (Tom Bartlett).
Mr. McCreedy warns Kevin to never go into the film vault, which Kevin
promptly ignores the next night whilst chasing a burglar!
We then discover what Mr. McCreedy’s little secret is; small
aliens which in no way look like Gremlins, *coughs*, have been locked away in
the film vault and Kevin has inadvertently set them free! Mr McCreedy is none too pleased and explains
that the alien’s spaceship landed in the studio 30 years ago and that they
possess strange hypnotic powers which puts people into their dream fantasies. This sounds quite pleasant until we then
discover that the Hobgoblins then turn these fantasies against their victims,
killing them in the process!
Now on the run, the Hobgoblins end up at Kevin’s house,
(coincidence!), where the rest of main
cast are dancing really badly to some very poor synth music, (which, from what
I can tell, is just the same 10 second tune on loop). These characters are: Steve’s
girlfriend Amy, (Paige Sullivan), pal and phone sex addict Kyle, (Steven Boggs),
sex addict Daphne, (Kelly Palmer), and willing to feed her addiction, army boy
Nick, (Billy Frank).
Kevin is tasked with finding the Hobgoblins and is told he
must find them before sunrise or else they will be unstoppable. Kevin, who has some kind of sixth sense it
would seem, goes to his house to track down the Hobgoblins, (seriously, is this
the only house in a 100 mile radius of the studio?).
One by one the gang are picked off by the Hobgoblins using
Kevin’s chum’s fantasies against them.
Kyle believes Fantazia, (Tami Bakke), the lady he speaks to
on the phone sex line, has come for him and drives off in his car with her. They go to a secluded spot, Fantazia gets out
of the car and unbeknownst to Kyle, starts to push the car towards the cliff
edge……
Amy’s deepest fantasy appears to be that of a stripper and
promptly goes to seedy nightclub, Club Scum, (I’ve not made that up!), where
she starts stripping and attracts the attention of Roadrash (Duane
Whitaker). Roadrash is the bouncer and a
wrong ‘un, but Amy is flattered by the attention and soon finds herself alone
with him……..
Nick’s fantasy involves being gunned up to the nines and
launching a one man Rambo style assault, but things look bleak when he
‘heroically’ throws himself onto a grenade to save his friends….. Daphne’s fantasy, meanwhile, seems to be the
offer of a load of squaddies in a truck parked up outside! Will she give in to temptation?
Will Kevin manage to stop Kyle going over the cliff
edge? Can he save Amy from
Roadrash? Will Mr McCreedy at least let
Dennis’ next of kin know that he may not be back for dinner?
Watch Hobgoblins, (currently available on YouTube in
original or MST3K format), to find out!
Hobgoblins is a bad movie, a very bad movie, a stupendously
bad movie!
Made on a budget of $15,000 it is very hard to see
where this money has gone. It certainly
didn’t go on the actors.
None of the 5 main young actors can act, which is a bit of
an issue if acting is your profession.
There are many pregnant pauses as synapses desperately fire up to
recollect the next cheesy line. There
are lots of looks towards each other, as if someone may have tattooed the
script onto their forehead or has the slightest inkling as to what is going
on. Unfortunately it appears that no one
has the foggiest and they are often met with glazed expressions from their hapless
colleagues.
My personal favourite actor in the movie though is Culver
who plays Mr McCreedy and who moves around the old studio as if he has shat himself
and is looking for the nearest toilet.
The most famous actor has to be Duane Whitaker who is
probably best known as Maynard, the owner of the shop Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames stumble into in Pulp Fiction (1994). It
is Whitaker who informed us that ‘the gimp’s sleeping’. Admittedly in Hobgoblins he plays a similar
character, but hey, having this movie and ‘Pulp Fiction’ on your CV is pretty
darn cool, so no complaints from me!
So if the money was not spent on the acting, surely they
spent it on a team of writers to deliver a decent script? Well no, Sloane did this and the quality
suggests he didn’t pay himself a living wage.
The dialogue is cheesy and usually revolves around Daphne wanting sex,
Nick asking Daphne is she wants sex and Kyle having phone sex.
What we end up with is a 70’s British saucy seaside postcard script and the movie should have been called Carry On Hobgoblins. This is not a bad thing and does lend itself
to some humorous moments, none more so that Kyle’s question to Mr McCreedy at
the very end, ‘Uh….excuse me sir, can I use your phone?’.
So they must have ended up spending all of their money on
the Hobgoblins puppets? Erm no….. As previously mentioned, they do look
incredibly similar to the Gremlins puppets, albeit fire damaged Far East
rip-offs being sold down the local market Gremlin puppets. The big difference is the lack of
animatronics. Less Gizmo, more Elmo.
This does lead to some incredibly funny but unintentional
scenes. For example, there is the
mystery of the height of the Hobgoblins.
They seem to be around 3 feet tall when on the ground, but once next to
a human, they appear to be the same height.
There is one scene when Daphne is in the garden which is just flat
ground when all of sudden next to her, looking eye to eye, is a Hobgoblin. Either he was on stilts or Daphne’s legs had
been cut off!
Then there are the actual fight scenes with the furry sods
in which it is very clear they actors are just wrestling with Teddy Ruxspin
look-a-likes. It’s very funny and looks
like someone has fallen into the plush toy aisle in Toys R Us.
But the best scene for me, in fact my favourite scene from
the whole movie is when the Hobgoblins escape and steal a golf cart. There is no movement from the puppets
whatsoever except for the wobble of the puppets as they go over small
bumps. It’s so obvious that they are
just stuck on and you end up with is scene which is hilarious and could have
been cobbled together by a Primary School with some PVC glue and a shopping
trolley.
And that scene is a classic example of why I love this
movie. There are so many unintentionally
funny moments that it is hard not to like it.
There’s the fight scene between Kevin and Nick in which they
hit each other with sticks. Upon each
impact, rather than a traditional Hollywood thud or thwack noise, they play a
synth sound instead! The end result is
rather than looking and sounding like a fight with sticks, it looks like they
are playing a new kind of body keyboard and are bashing out a new tune.
In fact, the synth sound effects continue throughout the
movie until around 70 minutes in, when the sound engineer appears to have a
break down and just plays every sound sample he has in his library. It brilliant and feels like a drunk has
fallen into Jean Michel-Jarre.
So back to my original question ‘was it the MST3K guys who
made this movie funny or, as I first thought, is it so ridiculously bad that it
becomes good?’.
The MST3K guys made this movie funnier and brought it to
many people’s attention, but this movie can definitely be enjoyed on its own
merit with no riffing. It is incredibly
funny, although more often than not this was probably not Sloane’s aim.
At the end of the day, what we have here is a movie which
has bad acting, a bad script and bad puppets.
Its parts individually are truly awful.
But the sum of its parts create the perfect recipe for a movie which
becomes so stonkingly bad, it transcends into good.
I can not recommend this movie enough; it’s a joy to
watch. Check it out on YouTube.
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