In _Ghoulies_, a handsome twenty-something inherits his father’s decrepit old mansion, sets to dusting and repairing the uglier bits, discovers a gown, staff and hand-scrawled notebook in an old chest and uses them to summon a tribe of pint-sized servants from the underworld. His first experiments with the occult aren’t exactly a roaring success - an attempted party summoning only manifests derision from his drunken, underwhelmed guests - but he soon gets the hang of it and, with glowing green eyes, allows himself to fall before the same compulsion that claimed dear ol’ dad. Who, for his part, isn’t entirely stationary in a shallow grave elsewhere on the grounds.

Just another participant in the flood of mean-little-monster movies that inundated theaters during the ’80s (see _Gremlins, Critters, Dolls, Puppet Master_ or _The Gate_), _Ghoulies_ lands right around the middle of the pack. Which, objectively speaking, isn’t a great place to be. Ham-and-cheesy even at the best of times, the tiny creature subgenre’s worst entries are enough to test the patience of any dedicated moviegoer. This example’s pretty bad, honestly, but it’s loose and silly enough to merit the watch for folks (like me) who are into the right kind of crappy cinema. The plot doesn’t waste any time getting to the goods, revealing its mini monsters in the very first scene and spreading their appearances liberally throughout the duration. We’ve got squat, snot-soaked beasts eavesdropping from trees, drawing pentagrams under beds, launching themselves out of closets and, in one quick shot so memorable it made the movie poster, baring gap-toothed grimaces from the belly of a toilet bowl. That last instance amounts to literally nothing, but I hooted and hollered nonetheless.

This is like an EC horror comic from the 1950s, converted to celluloid: all foggy atmosphere, dollar store scares, gratuitous slime, glow-in-the-dark magic effects and corny cackles. The critters (not _Critters_) are cheap and stiff, but smartly manipulated into a wide range of inane, hilarious poses and expressions. The story has ideas to spare, but most fall by the wayside for one reason or another. My favorite: the proposed gimmick of filming sections of the movie in 3D and signaling audiences to wear their red and blue specs each time a cast member dons a pair of sunglasses. They ditched that plan midway through production, leaving a whole bunch of puzzling scenes with the cast in shades, after dark, without any explanation.

_Ghoulies_ sucks, but it’s totally watchable.