The Screengrab : police academy

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

Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen, Again, to Steve Guttenberg

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

We would be remiss in not mentioning before this week fades away that Steve Guttenberg's latest fifteen minutes ran out when he was voted off ABC's Dancing with the Stars. In order to find this event deserving of comment, let alone a reason to break out the good champagne, one probably has to have lived through the 1980s, a period when Guttenberg's high public profile and cockroach-like staying power seemed to be one of the great pop culture mysteries of the time: to see Guttenberg starring in a movie was to better understand what some people saw in Judd Nelson. In the 1960s and 1970s, such performers as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, and even Al Pacino had played smart but alienated guys who may have felt physically inadequate compared to the bigger, more conventionally attractive people around them but who suspected that if they didn't fit in with the societal ideal, then that meant there was something wrong with society. In the 1980s, a time that was both celebrated and assailed as a period when America (or, at least, American media culture) tried to get back to a smoother, quieter, more Leave it to Beaver kind of atmosphere after the upheavals of the preceding decades, Guttenberg came across as a sweet dork, a none-too-bright guy who just wanted to fit in, and maybe he was able to coast for a long time partly on the feeling of reassurance it may have given some people to see someone so spectacularly unexceptional starring in whole string of movies, even if four of them had the words "Police Academy" in their titles.

Guttenberg's movie career basically died overnight at some point--in a spirit of generosity, I'd pinpoint its absolute last gasp at 1990, with the sequel to Three Men and a Baby--and except for a recurring role on Veronica Mars and the occasional guest shot on a Law & Order series, he's been undetectable on radar ever since. The Dancing with the Stars appearance was his Rambo IV--the sum total of what '80s nostalgia is able to do for him now. Unlike his recent TV acting jobs, where he seemed rather grumpy, he was clearly overjoyed at having a camera pointed at him again and made no attempt to play hard to get. His dancing was more notable for the facial expressions he assumed while on the floor than for anything that his body was doing below the neck, but his beaming, nearly radioactive happiness at being seen by millions while a studio audience cheered his name struck many people as very touching. On his last show, he was paired with a male partner and later that night appeared on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show, where he said, " "I did what I was told and I had a great time." There, in a nutshell, is the essence of Guttenberg's screen persona--he may not get it, and whatever part of him that does get it may not be sure he likes it, but he does what he's told, and is thrilled to be a celebrity who does what he's told. In his last minutes before disappearing again from the face of the Earth, he passionately delivered what I suspect was an adjusted version of the speech he wrote in his head more than twenty years ago just in case he won an Academy Award for Coccoon, and then, just as he was saying, "If I can just say one thing," he was interrupted by the show's host, Tom Bergeron, bluntly telling him, "You can't." (The show was in danger of running overlong because of his babbling.) It was the closest that Steve Guttenberg has come to being associated with a perfect moment since the strip-club scene in Diner.

Coming Soon: "Citizen Kane 2" Starring Bronson Pinchot

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Universal would prefer that you not call its forthcoming American Pie: Beta House a direct-to-video release. The preferred corporate euphemism is now "DVD Premiere." And as Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, studios have reconceived the direct-to-DVD release as an important, pre-planned moneymaking part of the operation. The key element here is the proper way to continue to exploit a well-established brand name to which you own the rights. A few years ago, if you got the numbers back on the fifth Police Academy movie and found that the profits had dropped off considerably from the first installments but that the damn thing was still making money, you had a clear choice: you could decide that, as George Clooney said after the release of Ocean's Thirteen, "This tree has been sapped," and spend the rest of your life having nightmares about the money that Police Academy 6 might have made, or you could suck it up, green-light yet another sequel, and bring shame and dishonor upon your family. Direct-to-DVD releases tied to a familiar title are a neat compromise solution. They don't cost as much to make or market, partly because they usually don't feature the same level of star power as the theatrical releases from which they sprang, but they still appeal to fans who have developed a Pavlovian reaction to seeing certain titles. At the same time, the films are often marketed a little more aggressively than you might expect, and the studios will try to maintain some kind of superficial linkage to the real movies. For instance, as Barnes explains, "the American Pie DVD spinoffs all feature Eugene Levy as a father figure — even though the character’s son stopped appearing after the series ended its run in theaters." This is crucial to what Craig Kornblau, Universal's President of Home Entertainment, insists on calling "the integrity of the franchise." (Barnes adds dryly, "Mr. Levy declined to be interviewed.")

This summer, Warners will embark on a little experiment in synergy when they release Get Smart, starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway, and with Masi Oka of Heroes and Nate Torrence in small supporting roles, to theaters, and at the same time release Get Smarter: Bruce and Lloyd and Out of Control, starring Masi Oka and Nate Torrence, and with Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway nowhere in sight, to DVD. Then there was Daddy Day Camp, a sort of sequel to the Eddie Murphy comedy Daddy Day Care, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. Built to go straight to DVD, the film so impressed its studio masters that they upgraded it to theatrical release, a decision that proved a bad one for the box office, the reputations of those involved, and the planet as a whole. In general, those passing judgement on the quality of these films risk being deluded because it's only natural to go in with expectations set way below the bottom of the bar. Those not pitched at children tend to be overstuffed with gore and/or full-frontal nudity, in an attempt to make some kind of virtue out of the films' not being submitted to the MPAA ratings board. As for the more family-friendly, fanciful ones, such as the "DVD Premiere" sequels to Dr. Dolittle and Garfield...well, as Barnes delicately puts it: "Special effects in these films, while improving as a result of cheaper digital technology, often require a little more imagination from viewers."