Ghoulies (1985)

Ghoulies begins, rather shockingly, with an attempted ritual infant sacrifice that is thwarted when the unholy priest's dagger is repelled from the boy's skin by some kind of magic. One can only assume that J.K. Rowling was influenced by this scene when writing Harry Potter.

Twenty-five years later, the intended victim in the first scene, Johnathan Graves, inherits the old family estate where, unbeknownst to him, the aforementioned ritual took place. He and his girlfriend move in, and in no time Johnathan finds a book of black magic spells and begins experimenting with the dark arts because it's fun and the robes are comfy.

For some reason, his conjurings and Satanic spell-casting kinda sour his girlfriend on their relationship. When she leaves him, Johnathan conjures forth a couple of little-person demons who promise him knowledge and power and the return of his girlfriend if he will perform this one dangerous ritual. 

Johnathan performs the ritual, which involves letting the puppet-monsters he conjured up early in the movie kill seven of his irritating friends. This awakens the corpse of the Satanic priest from the first scene, and we're off and running toward the predictable conclusion from there.

The titular Ghoulies themselves do practically nothing in this movie. They get flung onto people by production assistants a few times and rack up a few off-screen kills, but even these are negated by the ending of the movie. So these puppets are pretty pointless.

The rituals and black magic, on the other hand, are fairly well handled. The magic-users' glowing green eyes and elaborate robes look cool, and the guy who plays Johnathan delivers his evil-sounding Latin lines with enthusiasm. 

Really, they could have skipped the Ghoulies part of this movie and had a half-decent, cheap black magic movie (granted it would be a bit short). It seems, however, that the success of Gremlins for Stephen Spielberg led schlock producer extraordinaire Charles Band to push the miniature monster characters in hopes of striking box office gold. I guess it worked, too, since they went on to make three sequels to this turd.

There's not much to recommend about Ghoulies. It is billed as a horror-comedy, but it plays like simply a bad horror movie. I think they must have decided to throw in the "comedy" part when they saw how cheap and cheesy the finished product was. 

So yeah. If you find Ghoulies floating in your Netflix Instant Queue, you might want to flush it right back down.