brendan halpin

What to do when the world falls apart? Watch horror movies, of course! I wrote about Ghoulies here, and apparently this kicked off a spree of Funny Little Guys Wrecking Stuff movies.

Let’s start with Ghoulies II, shall we? (Oh, it’s fancy, so it gets the Roman numeral treatment!). Whereas the first movie was mostly concerned with the main guy’s descent into obsession with his Satanist dad’s magickal dabblings and featured comparatively little of the titular creatures, here the funny little guys get lots of screen time.

There’s a little nod to the fact that these funny little (glistening!) guys are demons or something at the very beginning, but then they invade a traveling carnival and all hell breaks loose and their origin doesn’t really matter. Veteran character actor Royal Dano is great as the alcoholic washed-up magician, and Phil Fondacaro is incredibly charismatic as the Shakespeare-quoting carny. I love to see a little person in a real role, which he is here, and, shockingly for a horror comedy from the 80’s, his stature isn’t played for laughs and is only mocked by the bad guy. So the carnies are trying to save the carnival, and there’s that nice “we’re a big family of misfits” vibe that you got in Freaks, and the funny little glistening guys get to wreak a lot of havoc, including finally delivering on the promise of the poster from the first movie. This is a really fun horror comedy that lacks the cruelty, racism, and homophobia you’ll find in, say, every John Hughes movie. A fun watch that definitely does not require any info from the first movie. Add this one to the list of sequels better than the original! (Which does not include Godfather 2. Don’t make me come over there.)

On to Critters, in which Funny Little Guys from space invade a small town, pursued by shapeshifting interstellar bounty hunters. (Is there a little too much going on in this movie? I would argue that there is!). The movie leans heavily into the funny little guys wrecking stuff (and killing!), and a bunch of it plays out as a siege, a la Night of the Living Dead.

M. Emmett Walsh is on board as the skeptical sheriff, a young Billy Zane is a doomed horny teen (in a nice twist, he’s less horny than the girl and he’s the one that ends up dying! Way to invert some 80’s horror tropes!), but the movie really belongs to Scott Grimes as the kid who knows what’s happening and can’t quite convince the grownups in town that killer hedgehogs from space are killing people. His performance carries, and I would argue elevates the movie. Dee Wallace is his mom and is appallingly underused by the filmmakers. She basically only gets to scream. She does this well, but if you’ve seen ET or The Howling, you know she’s capable of more. (New Line Cinema CEO and executive producer Bob Shaye’s sister Lin is also in the movie! Wonder how she landed that role?)

Anyway, there’s lots of fun havoc and a nice redemption arc for the town drunk, and it’s a fun movie.

The first one did well enough to spawn a sequel that flopped, but I’m really not sure why it didn’t hit. I guess the culture had moved on or something. Scott Grimes is back and every bit as good in this movie as he was in the first one, Barry Corbin takes over the role of the sheriff and is Barry Corbin, and this movie plays with the formula so that instead of “kid running around trying to convince people there’s a problem” it’s mostly “townspeople band together to fight funny little murderous guys.” It’s not as good as the first one, but it’s still a ton of fun. And don’t worry, the shapeshifting bounty hunters are back. One takes the form of a Playboy centerfold for a while, providing some gratuitous boob shots that are the only discordant note in an otherwise wholesome romp about killing murderous space hedgehogs.