Number 68: Hobgoblins (1988)
As noted in my review of Devouring
Waves/Devilfish, a popular successful movie is certain to launch its own
wave of imitators. In this case, it’s Gremlins.
We all know Gremlins is
a bit goofy and probably tries to be a bit too clever for its own good but it
was good fun. Hobgoblins is very bland
in comparison.
The hobgoblins of the title are little gremlinesque
creatures kept inside a vault in a Hollywood backlot that an eight year old
could break into. The goblins are like yoda toys but with white fur stuck on.
Their unique gift however is they will fulfil your fantasies
before they kill you. For one guy it’s to perform on stage, for another guy
it’s to be a real life Rambo. For one girl, it’s to become a big slut.
After the hobgoblins escape their vault they kill
exactly…zero people. Yes, they really are the most terrifying creatures in
cinema history. Even a guy who is burned alive turns up at the end with only
minor injuries.
I might as well explain what happens: a young guy called
Kevin is working as a security guard at the Hollywood backlot and accidentally
lets the creatures loose. He goes out looking for them and out of all the
thousands of people in town, the hobgoblins are interested in a group of teens
that happens to include Kevin’s girlfriend, Amy. Who is well out of order
towards Kevin by the way, getting the hump with him because he unsurprisingly
lost a friendly stick fight with rakes to a guy on leave from the army.
The goblins cause mayhem, nearly kill some of the group but
don’t and are chased back into their vault. Then an old guy who had been
guarding them for 30 years blows them up to end their menace. He could have
done that 30 years ago. Just saying.
And the film stops dead half way through when they visit a
punk nightclub and there is a whole song played by a band. The whole song. I
might have to check this but I don’t think the camera changes in the whole
thing, just one long shot of the band playing. There was no need for it.
That’s really all there is to it. The humour is weak, the story is stupid and the goblins look rubbish.
It’s a cheap Gremlins rip off, lacking any of its
charm or humour.
Number 67: Time Chasers (1994)
Time travel is always a tricky issue in movies, chiefly
because writers have little concept of causality.
The classic example of the problems with time travel is the
grandfather paradox, as described by science fiction writer Nathaniel Schachner.
Suppose time travel is possible, imagine you end up going back in time and
killing your grandfather (let’s not worry about the whys of this) before your
father was born. This is impossible as you would not exist, so you could not
kill your grandfather. Therefore, you must exist and time is caught in an
endless loop.
I do love a good paradox.
Time Chasers takes
the slightly easier option of having our protagonists travelling forward in
time.
The film was released in 1994 but looks like it was made in
1982. Everything about it looks cheap.
The star of our film is Matthew Bruch as Nick, and he does
not look like a movie hero icon. He has a stupid mullet, big thick-rimmed
glasses and an enormous chin. But you know what, well done to director David
Giancola for challenging our preconceptions of what a film star should look
like. That’s the story I’m going with rather than the more probable reason that
he just picked him up from a local community theatre group.
So Nick turns his plane into a time machine, no explanation
of how it works but that’s fine as it probably wouldn’t make sense anyway. Let’s
just say it has a flux capacitor. He demonstrates to his friend by flying 50
years into the future, where it’s a lot as it is now but people smile more.
They plan to sell it to a corporation, for the advancement of mankind. But
shock, horror it turns out they are an evil corporation. Nick discovers this
when he takes his journalist girlfriend on a date and they end up at the same
time in the future as before, only now it’s all decayed into ruins.
Nick then has to go back in time to stop himself from
signing over his time machine to the Big Bad Corporation. Nick meets himself
and despite Doc Brown’s warnings in Back
to the Future 2, this neither renders him unconscious or results in the
collapse of the entire universe. There
is a chase through time against the CEO of Big Bad that goes back to the
American War of Independence.
Future Nick slays the beastly CEO and past Nick resolves not
to sell his technology.
Oh, the paradox alarm is ringing. If Nick doesn’t sell his
time machine to the BBC, he couldn’t have known they were evil so he couldn’t
have gone back in time to stop himself from selling them his time machine. So
in order to stop himself from selling his time machine, he has to allow himself to sell his time machine.
Despite that little mindboggler, maybe I’ve been watching too many bad movies in the last
couple weeks but Time Chasers doesn’t
seem that bad to me. But I can’t help feeling that it should. Everything is
wrong but somehow so right.
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