Hobgoblins (1988, directed by Rick Sloane)

Posted on October 4, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Decades ago, a bunch of small, furry aliens crash-landed on a studio lot. The little aliens may be cute and they may love to laugh, but they’re also evil. They’ll make fantasies come true and then use those fantasies to kill their victims. The lot’s caretaker, Mr. McCreedy (Jeffrey Culver), has dedicated his life to making sure the hobgoblins remain locked away in a vault. After the hobgoblins kill a security guard who fantasized about being a rock star, Mr. McCreedy has to hire a replacement. Teenage Kevin (Tom Bartlett) takes the job because he’s trying to prove to his girlfriend, Amy (Paige Sullivan), that he can be responsible. Kevin accidentally frees the hobgoblins. Now he and his stupid friends have to stop them before they start granting fatal fantasies.

I don’t know that I really believe in the idea that a movie can be “so bad that it’s good,” but Hobgoblins comes close. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it also features scenes you will never forget. Early on, there’s an extended scene where Kevin and his friend Nick (Billy Frank) have a fight with a rake and a garden hoe. The scene goes on forever, it doesn’t add much to the plot, and then it ends with Amy, who is supposed to be a sympathetic character, getting mad at Kevin for losing. Later, when Kevin tells his friends that their lives depend on not fantasizing about anything, everyone reacts by talking about their favorite fantasies, and weirdo Kyle (Steven Boggs) immediately calls his favorite phone-sex hotline. When the hobgoblins are tracked down to a bar called Club Scum, it turns out that the prudish Amy has always fantasized about being a stripper who apparently doesn’t take off her clothes while performing. After Nick survives being in the middle of an explosion, he and his girlfriend, Daphne (Kelley Palmer), duck into a van that immediately starts rocking while everyone else just casually stands next to it.

The acting is amateurish and the plot is incoherent. Even after they’re set free from the vault, the hobgoblins don’t seem that interested in doing anything other than stalking the same small group of people. The hobgoblin puppets are actually not bad, and I like how they pop up in the background and start laughing whenever someone is having a fantasy. Hobgoblins has a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made, and that reputation is probably deserved, but I dare anyone to look away once the movie starts.

There aren’t many movies that can claim to start with a rock-and-roll fantasy and end with a rockin’ van and a joke about phone sex. Hobgoblins is one of the few.

October True Crime: Sins of the Mother (dir by John Patterson)

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the city of Spokane, Washington, Kevin Coe (Dale Midkiff) is a real estate agent who always tries to come across as being the slickest guy in the room. With his quick smile and his moderately expensive suits, Kevin certainly seems to fit the stereotype. It’s only when you start to look a little closer that the surface starts to crack.

For someone who goes out of his way to come across as being confident, Kevin is actually very immature and more than a little whiny. He’s living with a perfectly nice young woman named Ginny (Heather Fairfield) but it’s obvious that he’s keeping secrets from her. He comes home one morning with scratches on his face and, when she asks about them, he claims that 1) he got mauled by a dog and 2) he doesn’t need any sort of medical attention. Kevin is someone who frequently loses his job because he’s just not that good at it. When one boss fires him, Kevin replies that he’s going to start his own business and someday, maybe he’ll be the one doing the hiring and firing. It’s classic empty cope.

And then there’s Kevin’s mother. Ruth Coe (Elizabeth Montgomery) is someone who likes to present herself as being a grand diva, in the manner of a Golden Screen star. She’s extremely close to her son, at times overprotective and at times overly critical. Kevin often goes from yelling at his mom to dancing with her within minutes. Ruth makes it clear that she doesn’t like Ginny and Ginny eventually grows to dread seeing Ruth wandering around their house, uninvited. And yet, despite all of the time that Kevin spends talking about how wants to get away from his mother and to live his own life, Kevin doesn’t really make much of an effort to do that.

Meanwhile, Detective Liz Trent (Talia Balsam) is investigating a series of rapes that have been committed in Spokane. When she comes to suspect that Kevin is the rapist, Kevin claims that it’s not true and it’s just another case of the world treating him unfairly. Ruth stands by her son and eventually shocks everyone with just how far she’s willing to go to try to keep him out of prison.

Sins of the Mother is based on a true story. Kevin Coe may have only been convicted of four rapes but he is suspected of having committed at least 41. In prison, he insisted he was innocent and refused to attend any counseling programs. He also refused to apply for parole, even after he became eligible. After his criminal sentence was completed in 2008, he was sent to the Special Commitment Center on Washington’s McNeil Island, which is a institution that houses sexual predators who are likely to reoffend. I’m writing this review on September 15th. Coe, as of this writing, is scheduled to be released from McNeil on October 3rd so, by the time you’re reading this, he could already be out. Coe is 78 and is reported to be in fragile health.

As for the movie, it’s mostly memorable for Elizabeth Montgomery’s over the top performance as Ruth Coe. Sweeping into every scene and delivering her lines in what appears to be a deliberately fake-sounding Southern accent, Montgomery chews the scenery with gusto. While the rest of the cast often seems to be going through the motions, Montgomery grabs hold of this movie and refuses to surrender it.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 4.19 “The Correspondent”

Posted on October 23, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, Jonathan is a dream warrior.

Episode 4.19 “The Correspondent”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on February 24th, 1988)

Journalist Hale Stoddard (Darren McGavin) sits in a South American prison cell and waits to be executed. One-by-one, the other prisoners are dragged out of the cell and shot by the country’s new government. Hale passes the time by writing a letter that he knows no one will ever read.

Suddenly, Hale is no longer in the cell. Instead, he’s in the basement of his house. And there’s Jonathan. Jonathan explains that time has stopped and now, Hale is in his wife’s dream. Martha (Patricia Smith) dreams of Hale never being at home. She dreams of their son having both arms, even though he lost those arms in an accident when he was younger. (She also dreams of their now-adult son as always being a child.) Martha dreams about Hale’s former mistress, Eleanor (Eileen Barnett), standing around the house. (Hale argues that Eleanor was never in the house but Jonathan explains that, in Martha’s dreams, she is.) Hale comes to realize how often he deserted Martha because he couldn’t deal with settling down and raising a family. And now, while Martha dreams of him, Hale is about to be shot and killed….

Except, he’s not. It turns out that the South American prison was Hale’s dream. When Hale wakes up, he’s still at home. He tells Martha that he won’t be going to South American after all.

Awwww! How sweet.

This was a bit of a weird episode but I liked it. I appreciated how the show created Martha’s dream world by adding randomly weird details (like an oversized chair at the breakfast table, which was meant to represent Hale’s absence). Darren McGavin gave a good performance as Hale and resisted the temptation to overact. With the episode, the show tried to do something different and, for the most part, it succeeded.