Not enough Ghoulies!!
If the cover of your movie has a creature popping out of toilet. I your movie, you better have a creature popping out of a toilet. It’s Chekhov's gun. There was no ghoulie that ever popped out of a toilet. I was waiting the entire movie for a puppet to pop out of a toilet, and never got it!
Aside from that this movie is still pretty bad. The main actor has some weird green eyes that glow when he “invokes” them (I guess). I don’t really know, because they don’t explain it, and they show up when he is “more” menacing than he normally is. I also didn’t understand why they had to wear sunglasses towards the end. He could turn his weird green eyes off when he wanted. He didn’t need the sun glasses.
I also didn’t get why the main character decided he had to quit school to clean up a house. Why wouldn’t you just clean up the house after school??? It didn’t make any sense.
The movie is filled with pretty subpar acting. For some reason a female costar that seems like she was already in her fifties, but her actual age hadn’t caught up to her yet.
The ghoulies were the best part, but you only see them for maybe, maybe, 10 minutes out of the whole movie.
There were also these two dwarves that showed up for no real reason except to drink some liquid, and fight against their original master (maybe?)
Almost seems like someone had an idea for a bland cultist horror flick script, but was told "Gremlins are big, you gotta put some little dudes in this!", so they wrote in a couple of midgets, were subsequently told that didn't count, so wrote in some slimy puppets, but forgot to get rid of the bit they'd written about the midgets, and somehow made their bland idea straight-up bad. This came out the same years as _Gremlins_ though, so I have no idea how it was allowed to happen.
_Final rating:★½: - Boring/disappointing. Avoid where possible._
The ghoulies get a few kills in, but this is mostly focused on Jonathan becoming obsessed with acquiring power and knowledge in occult fashion. It's a good, silly B-movie with plenty of Satanic nonsense, just don't expect the ghoulie puppets to be front and center.
