Lest you were under the illusion
that a movie called Ghoulies Go To College might in fact be a subtle
treatise on the aching existential
loneliness at the heart of the human condition, the opening montage features
a zany student loosening the end of a janitor’s mop, so that the
janitor falls into his bucket and careens down some steps, crashing into
a professor, who hurls his books in the air, which land on the head of
another student, pushing his face into a big ol’ slapstick cream
pie.
And it’s all downhill from there.
Our setting is an All-American college and, worse, it’s Prank Week.
As witnessed in the opening scene, this is a particularly zany seven
days during which the Gamma and Beta fraternities try to out-do each
other with evermore elaborate practical jokes.
The Beta house is ruled by Skip, the reigning Prank King. He’s
an obnoxious and smug little twat who is also, unfortunately, the hero
of the movie. Pitted against him are the obnoxious posh fascists of Gamma
house, led by the subtly named Jeremy Heilman. There’s a girlfriend
caught between them as well, but we really don’t need to waste
any time on her woefully redundant romantic subplot. She’s not
obnoxious, but she is boring as hell.
Let’s not forget the other campus comedy cliché, the uptight
dean who just hates those rowdy pranksters. He’s here too, as Professor
Ragnar, and he conveniently doubles as the tutor of a class that seems
to be vaguely about mythology and stuff. It’s he, of course, who
discovers the means to unleash the Ghoulies (via a comic book, for no
apparent reason) and decides to use their malicious ways to spark an
all-out frat war, thus allowing him to end Prank Week forever, and expel
all his problem students.
For those who have never seen a Ghoulies movie, first of all – congratulations.
Secondly, you should know that they lie somewhere below Critters on the
scale of cheap Gremlins rip-offs. In the previous two movies there were
lots of them, and they were nasty and violent. In this movie there are
only three of them, and they talk. And by “talk” I mean “make
endless jokes and rarely get round to actually doing anything”.
To cut a crap short story even shorter, it all ends up with Ragnar trying
to sacrifice Skip’s dull girlfriend and, for some reason, merging
with the Ghoulies to create a giant hybrid monster. This seems a tad
excessive just to put an end to Prank Week, though you can’t help
but admire his commitment. Skip finally defeats Ragnar by flushing the
comic book down the ornamental toilet from which the Ghoulies first appeared,
and if there’s ever been an ending that doubles as a meta-textual
commentary on the quality of the movie itself, it’s this.
So where does Matthew Lillard, star of Scream and the Scooby Doo movies,
figure in all this? In the background, that’s where. He plays a
cartoonishly geeky character called Stork according to the credits, though
he’s never referred to by name in the movie. In fact, nobody speaks
to him at all. And he doesn’t speak to anyone else. He’s
just one of Skip’s crazy crew of Beta House japesters, and can
be seen loitering over the shoulders of the main characters in most scenes,
complete with pudding bowl haircut and thick glasses. As such, it’s
hard to gauge how good Lillard’s performance is but he does seem
very proficient at pulling exaggerated faces to convey such complex emotions
as “shock”, “anger” and “hilarity”.
So is it worth sitting through 94 minutes of witless rubber puppet horror
just to see Matthew Lillard gurning in the corner? Even if you’re
his biggest fan – hell, even if you’re his mother - the answer
is clearly a resounding no. This is an obnoxious movie with an obnoxious
hero battling obnoxious monsters to save a girl nobody gives a shit about.
Need to know: For this, his first movie role, Lillard
was actually credited as Matthew Lynn (his full name is Matthew Lyn Lillard).
Also in the movie
is Jason Scott Lee, who is best known for his lead turn in Dragon: The
Bruce Lee Story. He’s cast as a stereotypical Chinese technology
nerd but, unlike Lillard, he actually gets to speak on several occasions.
Lillard is now a star, while Lee remains trapped in straight-to-video
hell (see: Gerard Butler). Coincidence? Probably not. The Ghoulies franchise
managed to limp along to one more entry in 1994, directed by Jim Wynorski
(see: Jennifer Love Hewitt). Ghoulies IV was largely made up of reused
stock footage from the first movie, and the franchise hasn’t been
seen since. Nobody seems terribly bothered.
Availability: Ghoulies Go To College came out on DVD in the UK in 2001,
and can still be found at most online retailers for less than a tenner.
