continuediednews

starring Christopher Lloyd, Joe Picher, Tom Amandes

teleplay by Patrick Presume from Johnson & John Lau
directed by Patrick Pore over Johnson

When I was a kid there were cartoons on television really only once a week, movie theatres screened far fewer movies, and I read the same book every Halloween: Ray Bradbury's

Something Wicked This Way Comes

. When I was ten, Jack Clayton and Bradbury collaborated on the screen version of

Something Wicked This Way Comes

, and my pals and I made it an annual ritual to watch the film even though it wasn't nearly as good as the book, hamstrung as it was by Disney's clucking schoolmarm-ish attitudes. A kid today has cartoons 24 hours a day, every day of the year, maxi-plexes projecting 24 films at a time in stadium-seated amphitheatres, and at least four "children's" horror novels a year from the likes of Christopher Pike and (shudder) R. L. Stine.

Just like pitching in professional baseball, there's an inevitable drop-off in quality when we become obsessed with expansion, and the feckless dreck masquerading as kid's entertainment nowadays is as clear an indicator as any of our steadily declining popular culture. Bad enough that it was published, R. L. Stine's vapid kiddie-horror pamphlet

When Good Ghouls Go Bad

has been made into an even more vapid direct-to-video exercise starring the increasingly desperate Christopher Lloyd.

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A weird cross between that Halloween episode of "Amazing Stories",

Back to the Future

,

A Nightmare on Elm Street

, and

Footloose

,

When Good Ghouls Go Bad

is a wilfully cheesy, derivative bit of pre-pubescent camp schlock that isn't dark enough to be frightening yet too dark to be enjoyable. With its fakey matte backdrops and detestable high-decibel vaudeville performances, the film attempts to be some kind of burlesque: a live-action cartoon that pardons its existence with too-late moral messages unjustified and muddy besides.

When Good Ghouls Go Bad

is a collection of bad special effects, a disjointed narrative involving fireflies that cause the dead to rise somehow, and graduates of the screaming-as-emoting school of acting that no doubt ironically stirred the mouldering corpses of Stanislavsky and Adler. When our pint-sized hero does the guttural Macaulay Culkin yawp for the umpteenth time less than ten minutes into the running time, I began eyeing the stop button on my remote with great interest while fantasizing of a "melt disc" or a "temporarily blind/deafen me" option.

Danny (Joe Picher) is a picked-upon little coward who gets bullied around, does his best not to sound like a little girl when he shrieks, and runs into telephone poles when he's trying to look cool in front of that little brown-haired girl who's caught his eye. His grandfather, Uncle Fred (Lloyd), is the owner of a giant chocolate factory that has been shut down ever since the day a mysterious loner kid got incinerated in a giant kiln that was in the process of baking a mysterious statue. Written in the loner kid's own ashes (don't ask me how one writes something in his own ashes) is a curse warning that should the townsfolk ever again celebrate Halloween, he will return and unveil his statue. If none of this makes much sense to you, a viewing of the film would do nothing to dispel the obfuscating clouds.

Soon, Uncle Fred is killed beneath a giant pile of pumpkins and resurrected to become the titular ghoul–leading to the startling discovery that Christopher Lloyd over-acts even more when playing dead. Uncertainty arises as to the actual meaning of the title, as none of the ghouls in the film "go bad." The undead Uncle Fred recruits his irritating grandson Danny in a campaign to bring Halloween back to the little town of Willow Falls as marauding bands of zombies shamble around breaking doors and windows, and just in time for a trio of German investors to sign a big check for reopening the defunct chocolate plant…or something.

Much is made of Danny's yellow streak in the early going, with the fearful tyke getting comically concussed by the local bully and doing more running and stuttering than Don Knotts in a Tim Conway stinker. The apparent message of finding courage and standing up to toughs is quickly abandoned in favour of an equally sickening moral concerning the importance of fathers to play hooky now and again for their simpering children. That's all well and good (or it would be if it were handled in a lucid fashion), except that the father of the bully is dragged off at the end by a vengeful ghoul, handily orphaning the bully and his retarded brother. Great message.

When Good Ghouls Go Bad

is cheap, loud, and bad, bad, bad. It's criminally unfocused and would be difficult to endure at a quarter of its 93-minute running time–it's a geek show without purpose or end. As entertainments go, I can think of at least a dozen invasive medical procedures I'd rather endure. Momentarily, I'm off to cleanse my palette with a hot cup of spiced cider, a slice of pumpkin pie, and

Something Wicked This Way Comes

.

Presented in a nice 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer by Fox Video,

When Good Ghouls Go Bad

looks sharp and detailed. The Dolby Digital 5.1 track is well utilized and rumbling, broadcasting the shouted dialogue with an appalling precision. An eleven-minute featurette is a typically bizarre publicity piece whose highlight is writer/director Patrick Read Johnson talking about "themes" and "nuance" in regards to, of all things,

this

movie.

-



Walter Chaw

© Film Freak Dominant; filmfreakcentral.catch. This journal may not be reprinted, in uncut or in character, without the express consent of its author.

DVD


GRADES


:


Simile


A


Sound


A


DVD


VITALS:


RunningTime

93 minutes

MPAA

PG

AspectRatio(s)

1.78:1 ONLY, 16×9-enhanced

Languages

English DD 5.1,

English Dolby Environs

CC

Yes

Subtitles

English, Spanish
DVD-9
Precinct One
Fox