Hobgoblins is the Greatest Film Ever Made You Cowards

            

Roadrash presents my review of Hobgoblins

            Last spring, to procrastinate on my thesis, I wrote my true magnum opus, a definitive taxonomy of bad movies. In doing so, I discussed many of what I then considered to be the finest bad movies of all time – classics like Plan 9 and the Room, my personal favorite Manos: The Hands of Fate, and lesser known gems like A Talking Cat?!? and Hackers. Yet at the time of writing, there was still so much I didn’t know. I reference Birdemic in the article despite having not yet seen it, and the work of the most recent bad movie auteur (category 1c) Neil Breen was as-yet unfamiliar to me. Cats, which may go down in history as Hollywood’s greatest Flop (category 1b), hadn’t even dropped its infamous trailer yet. Most egregious at all, I hadn’t yet seen a film that is now as dear to my heart than Manos, a film that troubles the very stability of my taxonomy, a film that simply does not receive the love it deserves. That film is Hobgoblins.

            Reader, let me set the stage. In the final days of the decade, I was trapped on an Amtrak train on my way to visit my parents. South of DC, Amtrak rides on the borrowed tracks of freight trains and is obligated to stop whenever one needs to pass. Trips home are regularly hours delayed. I’d been onboard for nine hours and, facing the prospect of two more, said fuck it and made straight for the bar car. “Give me your most pretentious IPA,” I said. The young man behind the counter obliged and even opened the bottle for me. As the train rocked back and forth over the mountains, I did my best to keep my balance walking four cars with an open bottle of brewski and collapsed into my seat to watch the episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 I’d downloaded on my phone in case of just such an emergency. Within minutes, I was transported out of the stuffy train car and into the even stuffier world of Rick Sloane’s deranged imagination. I was forever changed.

            By reputation, I knew that the Hobgoblins episode of MST3K is a popular one, and that Hobgoblins is a pastiche of Gremlins. And yet reader, it is so much more. Honored both by a place in the IMDB bottom 100 and the prestigious Wikipedia “list of movies considered the worst,” Rick Sloane’s 1988 masterpiece contains everything I love in a bad movie – musical numbers, memorable characters, deranged illogic, bad special effects, a series of distinctively cheap locations – all smeared with a patina of wide-eyed innocence. The Wikipedia worst movies list calls Hobgoblins vulgar, misogynystic, and ugly, and it is all of those things, and yet it insults your intelligence with such an earnest naivety that I agree more with Jim Vorel of Paste’s assessment that it seems to have been written by a 10-year-old trying to be edgy. Seriously, this movie has the kind of we-made-this-in-the-backyard-with-props-from-the-toy-chest abandon I haven’t seen since that one Batpussy clip.

            Hobgoblins is set across three locations in an empty ghost LA – an abandoned movie studio, a dreary tract house, and Club Scum, the world’s wimpiest punk club. Grizzled security guard Mr. McCready guards the Hobgoblins in their unlocked prison at the movie studio, but when they escape, it’s up to his dopey new assistant, Kevin, to find them. The movie starts out slow but, once we’re introduced to Kevin’s friends, surely the motliest crew of losers in cinema history, the movie rises into the stratosphere. We have Kevin’s prudish girlfriend, Amy, who wants nothing more than for Kevin to become a lean mean killin’ machine like their recently enlisted pal Nick, who soon joins the gang with his handy van. Then there’s salmon-shorted dork Kyle and, best of all, my new hero, Daphne, Nick’s girlfriend, a technicolor tsunami of pure ‘8os Id who thinks you have sex by wiggling your hips side-to-side.

Daphne, my queen, demonstrates her sexual prowess with a mating dance

            It turns out that the titular hobgoblins special power is causing your wildest fantasies to come true in fatal ways. The kids have simple dreams; they long to call zoo-themed phone sex lines, strip for a drunken audience, punch robbers, and throw grenades. Only Daphne is immune to the Hobgoblins’ temptations, I assume because she is already living her very best life.

            Things really pick up when we arrive at Club Scum and our cabal of unemployed yuppies is thrown into sharp relief aside grubby bouncer and future Pulp Fiction star (really!) Roadrash, the unnamed MC doing a very good Joel Grey impression, and Marge-Simpson-haired waitress-cum-dancer Pixie. Here, a decent New Wave band performs a single inscrutable song, Amy removes her skirt and little else in the world’s most platonic strip routine, and as Nick hurls grenades at the offending hobgoblins, everything goes up in smoke. Though Nick is fully immolated in the damage, he returns by the end, bandaged, be-crutched, and ready to bone, for the happy ending. It’s the bloody cherry on top of a perfect sundae.

            And all that’s without discussing Kyle’s phone sex paramour, Fantazia, the temptress of hair metal, or the fact that the hobgoblins themselves are inarticulate puppets that can only nod and open their mouths, and no matter how many of them are shot, blown up, or slammed to the ground, there are always more, never mind that we began the film with a very finite number. The movie is surely elevated by some of the finest riffing in MST3K history but Mike and the bots were blessed with plenty to work with, making this one of the best congruences of movie specialness and riffing quality since, well, Manos: The Hands of Fate! There are layers to this thing. Layers!

The iconic Hobgoblins character design

            And yet despite its charm, its failed eroticism, its aggressive ‘80s-ness in a moment of extreme ‘80s-nostalgia that’s especially having its moment in horror, Hobgoblins doesn’t get the love it deserves. If I had stupid-rich-person money, one of the first things I’d buy would be one of those cute, awful puppets from filming, but I ought to be able to buy a mock-up on Etsy. Where’s my very own Hobgoblin, artists of the world?? While Manos has inspired fan works as varied as a puppet show, tribute songs, and attempts at a sequel, Hobgoblins’ coffer of tributes remains empty, though Sloane released his owgn sequel in 2009. But come on, bad movie fans! Think of the Halloween costumes, the postcards, the soundtrack albums, the unauthorized musical adaptations we could create. And I’ve never seen a movie more ripe for shadowcasting, the practice of acting out of the film in front of the screen popularized by Rocky Horror Picture Show fans. A movie needs long set-pieces and memorable costumes to be a good candidate – Hobgoblins has that in spades.

            At the top of this review, I mentioned that Hobgoblins was difficult to classify in my taxonomy. But surely, Sara, you may be saying, this is an obvious B-movie, made to fill the niche of direct-to-VHS Gremlins rip-offs that paved the road for today’s egregious mockbusters. Sure, but those latter-day B-movies are the product of studios, while Rick Sloane has the DIY gumption of an auteur. Credited as director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor, it’s clear that Hobgoblins was a labor of love. It’s no wonder he went back to make a sequel twenty years later as a loving tribute to, well, himself. But unlike the painful naivety of bad movie auteur’s such as Neil Breen and Claudio Fragasso, convinced they made a masterpiece, Sloane in self-aware. He submitted his film to MST3K and brags about its spot in the IMDB bottom 100. He knew exactly what he was doing. Is Hobgoblins a bad movie at all, or is it, like Rocky Horror, which Sloane got his start promoting, a self-conscious masterwork of camp?

            Just kidding, it’s absolutely not that. While Sloane embraces his disasterpiece on its own terms, he has delusions of his own. According to Wikipedia, Sloane invites comparisons to John Waters which, buddy, no. John Waters made subversive trash art as queer rebellion against straight society. You made Hobgoblins. Bad taste, sure, but with the political thrust of a child’s drawing of a smiling sun. Clearly Sloane hasn’t read my taxonomy, which puts Waters definitively in category 3a, the campy film.

            So what is Sloane, self-conscious director of intentionally bad movies made with love and personality and far more ambition than a Roger Corman flick? An auteur or a hack? It’s a very similar dilemma I had when writing the taxonomy originally and considering the oeuvre of David DeCoteau, creator of Sorority Babes of the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama, The Brotherhood, and of course, his masterpiece, A Talking Cat !?! And so, goddamn-it Sloane, here it is, a category of your very own, as befits your dedication to your terrible, terrible craft.

            Category 1d: The Gorbage Auteur

            Unlike the Bad Movie Auteur, the Gorbage Auteur knows full well he’s making a bad movie, and he’s pretty dang happy about it. But unlike the B-movie filmmaker, commissioned for quickie projects by a studio, the Gorbage Auteur marches to the beat of his own drum, imbuing his projects with his own distinct sensibility, be that homoeroticism, gothic gimmicks, or cheap ’80s sleaze. The Gorbage Auteur is likely to make films outside the studio system or even start his own studio in order to maintain creative control, further distinguishing him from the B-movie filmmaker.

            So here’s to you, you DeCoteaus, you Rick Sloanes, dare I say it, you William Castles, you geniuses of gunk, masters of mess, Spielbergs of slop! While you may lack the baffling obliviousness of our beloved Wiseaus, yr beloved by us devotees of trash, as you dedicate your careers to bad for bad’s sake.