Goblin

Goblin starts on October 31 in 1831 as the residents of Hollowglen are gathered around a raging fire, the townspeople are scared of a deformed newborn baby & toss it into the fire to keep the town clean & pure. However the baby's mother is understandably upset & since she is also a Witch decides to put a terrible curse on Hollowglen, every Holloween from this night forward a demonic Goblin from hell will rise take any baby that it can find. Jump forward to the present day as Neil (Gil Bellows) & Kate Perkins (Camile Sulivan) reach Hollowglen after a long drive, with them are Neil's seventeen year old daughter Nikki (Tracy Spiridakos), her best friend Cammy (Erin Boyes) & their young baby son Nathan. In town to complete a real estate deal the Perkin clan find the locals rather strange & somewhat hostile, eventually the family learn of the curse & also find out that the baby stealing Goblin of legend is very real... This Canadian production was directed by Jeffery Scott Lando & is yet another Sy-Fy Channel original creature feature that in truth has nothing original about it, as expected Goblin is just a string of clichés & bad CGI computer effects padded out to an hour & a half. Most of the plot elements from Goblin have been seen many times before, the ancient curse, the Halloween date, the supernatural monster, an unsuspecting family caught up in it, the small creepy backwoods town, the crazy old drunk man no-one listens to but is right, annoying teens who are there just to get killed off & the final magical implement that is used to destroy the monster. You can tick the clichés off, Goblin is uninspired & throughly predictable. The first half of the film concentrates on the squabbling between the Perkins family while I do admit it does pick up in the second half it's still not very good. For a start why were that couple trying to make a deal with the killer Goblin? Do Goblins understand English? Did they not think it might just kill both of them & take the baby anyway? The final plan to kill the Goblin wasn't that well thought out & sounded like Nikki just had to stand there as bait while no-one decided what to do once the Goblin showed up. Also why did the Goblin go after & kill the teens in the woods? Wasn't it's purpose to take babies? None of them had babies or were hiding babies or had anything to do with babies so why randomly kill them? Although Goblin is meant to be set during Halloween everyone is wearing summer clothing, also much of Goblin takes place during broad daylight which does nothing to build the tension or suspense. While the Goblin is definitely a monster the makers decided to place a cloak over him for most of the film so there are scenes of this cloaked figured chasing teens around the woods that feel more like a slasher than a creature feature but the cloak does come off eventually & while the special effects vary from poor to average the Goblin looks alright for the most part. There's a bit of gore which is really the only thing stopping me from rating Gobin a one, a guy's head is crushed, a girl is seen ripped in half with her guts strewn everywhere & there's some blood splatter & spurts. Probably shot on the usual low budget Goblin looks alright, much of the film takes place inside the same cabin & stretch of woods though. Filmed in British Columbia in Canada. The acting is about the same for this type of film, nothing special & no-ones going to win any awards. Goblin is yet another routine creature feature from the Sy-Fy Channel that isn't as bad as some of the crap it makes but in the grand scheme of things you can do without seeing it. If you can get through the first half then you might find the second half better but overall it's a difficult film to recommend.

My advice would be to watch this movie in full before you judge it. Every Halloween, a small hamlet in the deep woods is visited by a fierce goblin, intent on capturing infants and brutally murdering anyone in its path. I refuse to totally dismiss this, because I find it quite engaging, in a guilty pleasure sense. The cinematography is stark and bare, with only the soundtrack adding some effect. Other than that, it was an okay film, and I would recommend that people watch it. My girlfriends and I were so excited to see this movie, thinking it was going to be a fun movie. It gets a final good rating of 7 out of 10 from me.

This is a SyFy Channel horror movie. Therefore, by definition, it is going to be low budget schlock - if you have seen any SyFy movies then you will know this going in and, if you haven't, I'm telling you now. It isn't awful. It is well photographed and, in general, well put together technically - there are plenty of horror films which are badly lit, out of focus, muddy sound, hand-held when a tripod should be used etc. etc. and it is pleasing when those problems aren't there to make a poor film worse. Also, it is tolerably well acted, and has an unusual monster. There is some fairly explicit gore for gore watchers (low in volume, maybe, but moderately chunky, so to speak). What Goblin doesn't have is any surprises, but the horror movie which does is a rare beast indeed. There are loads of films around which are much worse than this, which is a decent attempt by SyFy to make a small budget stretch further than you would expect.

A script that would have been original and worked, I dare say, 60 years ago maybe. Poor directing. "Overly creative" editing (if that's even a thing) that just... fails too many times. At the beginning this film fails every other scene until it starts failing in every scene and it just turns into a comedy. But let's focus on the best part... ...the acting. I felt sorry for the performances from almost every single actor. I really did. It's like "awwwww... she can't act" and then "awwww... he can't act either" and finally "awww... this is such a big mess" (note: that's when the master shot comes up and you have both of them in frame hehehe ;). Seriously. It really is that bad. But it's so much fun at the same time. That's actually what kept me watching this. If the acting was slightly better it would have killed the film for me because then it would have become unbearable. But it didn't so I give it a solid 10/10 because I had such a wonderful time and actually bothered to write this.

I really wanted to like this film, and I did sit through all of it to give it the benefit of the doubt. But it just doesn't measure up. For a while I thought maybe it was best viewed as a horror-comedy, but it doesn't have enough comedy, and all of it seems to be actually unintentional, rather than sort of ironic. The cast is cute, so that's a plus. In particular, Brett Dier seems to be going for a young Ryan Phillippe look, which he carries off well. Unfortunately, Ryan at that age had an agent/manager who cared which films he appeared in, and Brett doesn't. For a horror-slasher type film, I think we're long past caring whether the writing makes any sense. It's the directing and special effects that torpedo this film. The monster looks and acts ridiculous, and could have been animated using 1990s technology. And if the "loud-noise-plus-sudden-close-up-repeat-twice" technique wasn't already cliché, it certainly was by the time this film was over. Why do British Columbia and Canada * themselves out for these pathetic films? They are surely capable of quality work. Is film make-work welfare that important instead? When will people realize that if you're eager to put your name to garbage, you shouldn't expect anybody to ask you to make something worth making. Think long-term, guys.

It's a huge pet-peeve of mine when people who worked on a movie, rate it and review it on IMDb... And, I'm pretty confident whoever wrote the glowing review on this site worked on the movie because no one in their right mind would ever try to make the claim that ""Goblin" takes the material totally serious with zero camp or goofiness.". I'll bet my life that this script was written in a weekend and put into production for no other reason than because there is a TV network with standards so low, it will buy movies like this. It's a collection of horror clichés and idiotic dialogue. The plot isn't any better. There must be hundreds of intelligent, fully-developed, exciting screenplays laying around in studios throughout N. America not getting made and yet, we get Goblin.. woopity-doo! This movie may honestly be good for a laugh but not much more.

Moviecut—Goblin

Caught this on The Horror Channel here in the UK, and was expecting another film that I'd switch off after the first 20 minutes,but no, within the first 5 minutes, I was hooked. It's not particularly original, but it's done with such gusto it feels fresh,and the actors seem to be having a blast which helps. Considering this was(apparently) a made for TV movie,it was pretty gory in places,with the effects being well done. I liked it that much, I ordered a Blu Ray of it from Germany for the ridiculous price of one euro! If you see it coming on TV, give it a go, you might be pleasantly surprised.

source: Goblin

Arriving in a small mountain town, a family staying at a local cabin-in-the-woods finds that the local curse about a ravenous goblin-like creature terrorizing children is indeed true and must race to save their infant son from its blood-filled rampage. This here was a rather good creature feature effort, but it does have a few flaws. One of the better features here is the rather strong storyline that comes about involving the central storyline of the creatures' curse over the town, making use of some really creepy moments and a great motive for the creature to get some good moments in. There's some good work done here about the creatures' conjuring in the opening scene that involves the ceremony performed and what's transpired out of it that looms over the town afterward is all quite well-done as the gradual revealing of this in the second half leads to some great times. That also manages to make the action in here fair enough and features plenty of great encounters here. The creatures first appearance in the woods, taking out the necking couple while interspersed with the tense chasing around the woods as the confrontations here make for some really enjoyable action, the attack on the house features some solid stalking with the creature running around the house and their different barricade attempts to hold it back before it breaks in leading to some more chasing to escape which makes for some really great times and the finale features them holding off the creature appearing at the conception pit before leading back to the final battle at the house, which along with the fact that the kills are great at delivering a solid, rousing finish to this one. Given the bloody kills throughout here as a whole, these provide the film with a lot to really like to hold off some of the flaws. One of the biggest issues here is the fact that there are the usual Sci-Fi Channel affairs showing up, so you know what the lame special effects for this one is going to be like. It's got all the usual hallmarks, from the obvious and badly-rendered design for the creature to way too much time of it performing inhuman feats like jumping around while stalking and even manages to come away with another issue here in having it hide away under a cloak for a vast part of the first half, which all makes for a slightly disappointing main villain. Likewise, there's also the fact that this one falls under the notion of featuring the cliché about people who are in the know about what's going on keeping it from those who would benefit from their knowledge, as not only does the one relative who knows how to finally get rid of the creature is truly unoriginal and really just drags the story out when it could've saved them a lot of trouble earlier. As well as a useless and completely overt homage to a classic horror film in a throwaway sequence that's stuck in here for no reason other than to showcase this homage, there's not a whole lot else to hold it back. Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Language and children-in- jeopardy.