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.
