Hobgoblins(1988)/Written, Produced and Directed by Rick Sloane- Oh God ! This is going to hurt.
Now aside from the fact that I’ve lost a day of work, that could have been used for the programming and designing of my Virtools maze game, which is very rudimentary. Well in my case, the maze is made out of plywood and gyproc texture, for every wall in the maze, (yeah I wasn’t amazingly inspired). As for gameplay, I only wanted to make a Pac-Man for idiots. I’m not using Unity yet, but right now I’m having every sort of problem of doing the simplest collision management tasks in scripts, and the online reference doesn’t happen to work either. In a way, I’m trying to do a collision detection on a skin character with an object, the object is itself a switch.
Well anyway, I needed to unwind because programming games sure knows how to be a strain on the mind, even if you need to be slightly alert to judge your tasks that you gave in the “building blocks”. So this huge collosal stinker of a Rick Sloane epic, would probably show me the light of hubris, which relaxes me a lot. Luckily enough, I was able to view this as an MST3K episode, and this movie is just riffed unmercifully, like there was no tomorrow by Mike Nelson and the Bots (Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett). And they always give, an oh so funny performance, mocking, degrading and ridiculing through witty banter and remarks, every obscure dreadful film that has ever seen the light of day. The movie Hobgoblins is not the worst film that I’ve ever seen, it’s really not as worst than Brad Jones’s Cheap, and that film is lordawful. Since Cheap, I’ll never watch a Brad Jones film ever again. Dear Lord. Hobgoblins has at least the merit of being technically adequate. There was considerable effort from Sloane into making an interesting film, but that would fail flat through the poorest of character development, and also mainly the excessively cheesy and shallow writing. Sloane’s direction is actually miserable, because the man just has no idea of what real actors are. The actors themselves are way too childish to star in films, and it transpires immensely. Yeah, having grown people in their twenties behaving like teenaged brats, is fairly much excruciating. Was it the directing that made it this way, well who knows, and right now, it’s not amazingly important. Through it’s hackneyed writing, it did have an interesting premise : gremlins use people’s dreams to kill them. It tried to copy to Gremlins by Joe Dante, by mixing in, a little bit of Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Wes Craven, through the mid-80’s . Hobgoblins, despite of all this, garnered a large cult following, inspiring a sequel, Hobgoblins 2, having Sloane as director and writer once again. Is Hobgoblins 2 a significant step up to the first one ? Well I haven’t seen it yet. I do understand the cult response behind this film, because in all of it’s flaws and massive imperfections, it’s an enjoyable movie to watch, nonetheless. Otherwise, you need to see this film, while inventing drinking games with some of your best mates and best gals, and still be the last one sober. Just try to be the last one sober, I dare you !
Besides Hobgoblins, Rick Sloane has directed a lot of forgettable films, and this one is what he’s mostly known for. Did he really succeed, when you think about it ? Well, if Hobgoblins was directed by another person, let’s just say for instance, Peter Jackson, with the same script, would it be the same movie ? Keep thinking uselessly about that, well I’ll watch some Saturday Night Live in the meantime. Sloan’s is a small harmless, guilty pleasure of a film for being so ridiculous.
2.6*/5
M.L
November 12th 2011
