The Screengrab : hobgoblins

Unwatchable Recap: 81-90

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Welcome back to the Unwatchable Halftime Report. We’re getting ready to tackle the 50 worst movies the Internet Movie Database has to offer, but before we get there, let’s take a little breather and survey the wreckage we’ve left in our path. Yesterday we checked out Unwatchables 91-100, so let’s move on up to the next ten.

90. The Bat People. “If The Bat People is notable at all (hint: it’s not), it’s as one of makeup guru Stan Winston’s earliest efforts, though I suspect he’d leave it off his resume if the IMDb didn’t exist. When we finally get a full view of the transformed John, he looks less like a bat than an extra who stole a mask from the set of the Planet of the Apes TV series.”

89. Bloodlust! “The exclamation point means extra thrills! At least, I wish it did.”

88. College Road Trip. “Fathers, it’s not a good idea to sneak into the sorority house where your daughter is staying and hide under her bed. In fact, it’s a good way to get tazed. And young ladies, if your dad hides under your bed, that just means he loves you. But not in a creepy way. Really.”

87. The Sidehackers. “Vince Rommel (gravel-throated biker movie stalwart Ross Hagen, a poor man’s Steve McQueen) is the king of the sidehacking, “a new and exciting sport filled with thrills and spills you’ve never seen before.” And after you’ve watched The Sidehackers, you still haven’t seen them, despite the copious footage on display. Many minutes of sidehacking are presented for our consideration, none of them exciting in any way.”

86. Hobgoblins. “We’ve all heard of doing more with less, but somehow Sloane has managed to do less with less; if he spent any more on Hobgoblins than I spent on lunch today, he didn’t get his money’s worth.”

85. Battlefield Earth. “For a while, we were all so happy for Travolta and his big screen comeback. By the time Battlefield Earth rolled out, there probably wasn’t a person left on the planet who was still happy for him besides his agent.”

84. It’s Pat. “The premise was so thin that the true joke of the sketch quickly became: Can you believe we’re doing this fucking Pat sketch again? So it’s no wonder that the 1994 feature film version became a punch line long before it was given its belated, limited…I hate to even call it a ‘release.’ More of a parole, really.”

83. First Sunday. “The only point of interest is the flamboyant choir director played by Katt Williams, who walks a fine line between mincing gay stereotype and recently arrived space alien.”

82. American Soldiers. “Your old-timey war movies may have been cliché-ridden, but at least you could count on some reliable caricatures like Brooklyn, Country, Mad Dog, Four Eyes, Mama’s Boy and Sarge to help you tell the members of the unit apart. Here you have Sarge, and I think there’s another Sarge, and definitely a medic called Doc and then a bunch of beefy guys with very few acting credits among them. One of the Sarges spends most of the movie in a stretcher, so I was able to keep track of him pretty well.”

81. Soccer Dog: The Movie. “There’s a million family flicks like this – in fact, there’s a whole subgenre of “dogs playing sports” movies like Air Bud and its sequels, and even a Soccer Dog sequel, European Cup. (There’s also the baseball-playing monkey movie Ed, but I have a feeling we’ll be getting to that eventually.)”

91-100

Unwatchable #84: "It’s Pat"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

When we looked at Hobgoblins the other day, I mentioned that it might be possible to construct a Bottom 100 list made up entirely of Gremlins ripoffs. Now it occurs to me that you could probably do the same with Saturday Night Live spinoffs, a thought that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. What horrors await me further up the list? Coneheads? Superstar? A Night at the Roxbury? But after watching It’s Pat, my mind was put at ease. For there to be another SNL movie on the list, it would have to be worse than It’s Pat, and science has proven this to be impossible.

By “science” I mean “me sitting through all 77 minutes of It’s Pat.” Now, 77 minutes may not sound like long to you, but let’s remember that all time is relative. A 77-minute James Bond movie would probably zip on by, but for a movie based on a sketch that wore out its welcome thirty seconds into its first of many iterations, it’s 4620 seconds of pure torture. Surely you remember Julia Sweeney’s beloved Pat character – the tight curls and bushy unibrow, the thick-rimmed glasses, the western shirt and khaki slacks clinging tightly to a blobby physique. And you remember the one and only joke about Pat: Is she a he or is he a she? Nobody knows!

The premise was so thin that the true joke of the sketch quickly became: Can you believe we’re doing this fucking Pat sketch again? So it’s no wonder that the 1994 feature film version became a punch line long before it was given its belated, limited…I hate to even call it a “release”. More of a parole, really. Anyone in their right mind would rather watch 77 minutes worth of surveillance footage of writers Jim Emerson, Stephen Hibbert and Sweeney trying to cobble the script together. “Okay, I’ve got it! Pat falls down the stairs and cries, ‘I’ve crushed my nuts!’ But it turns out – Pat has a pocketful of walnuts! And now they’re crushed!” “That’s good, but I’ve got you beat. We see Pat’s equally androgynous lover Chris (Dave Foley in a unisex bob and colorful assortment of muumuus) with his hand in her lap, or her hand in his lap, or whatever, and Chris says ‘I love to stroke your pussy.’ But –get this – Pat has a cat in his or her lap!” And so it goes, until you’re half-convinced you’re watching some sort of experimental anti-comedy.

To the extent that I’ve spent any time thinking about it, I guess I’ve always figured Pat for a dude, but of course, it makes no difference. Either way, Pat is perhaps the most repulsive character ever to headline a comedy. Self-absorbed, rude, oblivious, and gross beyond human measure, this is no one you want to spend your valuable time with – man, woman or otherwise. It represents a career low point for everyone involved, including former SNL regular Charles “One Season” Rocket and cult band Ween, who seem only mildly embarrassed. Really, the only funny thing about the movie is its German title: Was ist Pat? Now that’s comedy.

Previously on Unwatchable:
85. Battlefield Earth
86. Hobgoblins
87. The Sidehackers
88. College Road Trip (pending)
89. Bloodlust!

Unwatchable #86: "Hobgoblins"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I haven’t done the math, but it’s within the realm of possibility that you could fill out an entire Bottom 100 list made up of nothing but Gremlins knockoffs. There have been at least four Critters movies, four installments of Ghoulies and a trilogy of Munchies, as well as lesser-known attempts like Beasties, Spookies and Kamillions. And then there’s our topic for today, 1988’s Hobgoblins.

I’ll admit to being unfamiliar with the work of writer/director Rick Sloane before now, and based on the evidence onscreen in Hobgoblins I would have been willing to bet it was his first and only movie-making effort. But I would have lost that bet. By the time he made Hobgoblins, Sloane already had several horror shows under his belt, including Movie House Massacre and The Visitants, which has a catchy title if nothing else. He is also responsible for six, count ‘em six installments of the Vice Academy series, which presumably bears the same resemblance to the Police Academy collective as Hobgoblins does to Gremlins: a smudgy, degraded Xerox of the original.

McCreedy, an elderly security guard at an abandoned Hollywood studio lot, is having trouble finding a reliable assistant. It seems everyone he hires ignores his warnings to stay away from the vault, despite the often fatal consequences of setting foot inside of it. He finally seems to have a worthy successor in Kevin (Tom Bartlett), a mild-mannered fellow whose frigid girlfriend Amy (Paige Sullivan) is constantly berating him for his lack of manliness. In his attempts at foiling a burglary, Kevin does indeed enter the vault, accidentally freeing its inhabitants, the titular hobgoblins. As McCreedy explains, the little critters arrived 30 years earlier in a tiny spaceship and virtually destroyed the studio with their other-worldly abilities. The hobgoblins have the power to make your wildest fantasy come to life, but in true “be careful what you wish for” fashion, the end result is deadly – except when it’s not, which is unfortunately too often the case here.

We’ve all heard of doing more with less, but somehow Sloane has managed to do less with less; if he spent any more on Hobgoblins than I spent on lunch today, he didn’t get his money’s worth. The creatures themselves appear to be Gremlins puppets straight from the Toys R Us shelves, the grand total of three locations are underdressed and underlit, and the apartment when Kevin and his friends hang out looks distressingly like a place I used to live in North Hollywood. (I know I shouldn’t hold that against the movie, but I’m only human.) I’m not suggesting that Sloane set out to make a bad movie on purpose…just that he was aiming low and didn’t quite hit the mark. There’s a spoofy, Troma-like sensibility to the proceedings, including a very silly and pointless rake battle between Kevin and the Army-trained boyfriend of his friend Daphne, a slutty Cyndi Lauper fashion victim. The only remotely endearing character in the movie is Pixie, the beehive-haired waitress/go-go dancer in the endless Club Scum sequence that more or less serves as the movie’s climax.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Hobgoblins – for all I know, everyone had fun making it and nobody got hurt. Perhaps I should be more forgiving of the low budget, even though wit doesn’t cost anything (yet can be very hard to find). But…wait! What’s this at the top of Rick Sloane’s IMDb page? It’s…it’s…(choke) Hobgoblins 2, scheduled for release later this year. Please excuse my fleeting magnanimousness.

Previously on Unwatchable:
87. The Sidehackers
88. College Road Trip (pending)
89. Bloodlust!
90. The Bat People
91. Horrors of Spider Island