Goblin

To be honest, I was expecting Goblin to be complete rubbish, which is the standard I have to put with with a vast majority of SyFy's resume. But I was surprised that while not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination it was not bad either.

True, there are a lot of pacing issues with the movie moving a little too slowly for my liking. Goblin also starts off rather dull and the ending is a let-down and takes a while to set up. The dialogue is better than I thought it would be, but some of it was still rather idiotic.

However, the story is intriguing. While the pacing disallowed the story to do more than it had potential of doing, the idea was great and there are some scenes that have a genuine atmosphere to them. The production values are surprisingly not cheap with decent make-up and effects and atmospheric lighting and camera work. The music is also very creepy. The acting is also much better than anticipated, Gil Bellows especially manages to do something quite special with his role.

Overall, a better film than I thought it would be, but part of me thought it could've been better too. 6/10 Bethany Cox

On 31 October 1831, in the Hollow Glen village, the locals sacrifice what they consider "unclean" in a bonfire to protect their village. When they throw a deformed baby in the bonfire, his mother, who is a witch, curses the babies of the dwellers and creates an evil creature from the bones of her son to take their souls in the Halloween. The story of the Goblin becomes a legend.

In the present days, Neil Perkins (Gil Bellows) travels with his second wife Kate (Camille Sullivan); his rebel teenage daughter Nikki (Tracy Spiridakos); his baby son Nathan (Jordan Moore) and Nikki's best friend Cammy (Erin Boyes) to an isolated cabin in Hollow Glen expecting to start a business with his partner Owen (Colin Cunningham). The family is warned to leave the village before the Halloween by the drunkard Charlie (Donnelly Rhodes), but they do not give credit to his words.

On 31 October, Neil, Kate and Owen have a meeting with Sheriff Milgreen (Kyle Andrew Wheeler) and they leave Nathan with Nikki and Cammy. The two girls are visited by three friends and Nikki leaves Nathan alone for less than one minute. When she returns, the baby is missing and the Goblin is killing her friends.

"Goblin" is a lame horror movie where it is hard to say what is the worst: the story, the direction, the acting or the edition. The plot is stupid and full of clichés and annoying characters. The performances are terrible, highlighting Colin Cunningham in a silly role. The edition is awful, with inadequate cuts. The direction is very poor. The result is a forgettable movie. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Goblin – O Sacrifício" ("Goblin – The Sacrifice")

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.

I did not expect much from the horror film "Goblin" and it still undelivered. "Goblin" is essentially about a fierce goblin who flies around a small town hunting babies, largely because he (the goblin) is not intelligent enough to go hunting in the big cities where there are (of course) more babies to hunt. Normally such a premise presupposes that the adults in this film are perfectly safe from the goblin's attacks because... well... they are not exactly babies. But the people who made this film created a goblin who is less intelligent than many of the creatures on the nature channel. The hyena, for instance, rightly focuses on grabbing a baby sea lion for lunch instead of taking on the bigger sea lions, but the goblin gets distracted while hunting for babies and kills several adults in highly gratuitous ways for reasons that are never adequately explained in this film. I would suggest cynically than the killing of adults was done out of shock value rather than for any logical reason.

But Goblin's problems go well beyond the fact that it is little more than a bloody monster fest. The use of the teenage Cammy (Erin Boyes) as a sexual tease shows how low the filmmakers were willing to go to get people to actually watch this film. Finally there is not one performance in this entire film that is actually convincing or interesting in any way. You get the distinct feeling while watching this movie that the actors simply showed up to say their lines, collect their pay cheques and leave. Not one member of the cast was motivated to making this film work at a performance level.

Another SyFy movie... And you never know what you are going to get with these; it is either really bad or actually quite good. SyFy have been known to surprise us viewers from time to time.

Unfortunately, "Goblin" wasn't a nice surprise. That being said, it is not one of the worst SyFy movies though. The storyline was a bit interesting, about a town being cursed for some wrong-doings of the past. But the part with the goblin? Well, that didn't really work well with me.

The goblin itself resembled more a ring wraith from "Lords of the Ring" than a goblin. Now, I know what goblins usually look like in role-playing games, so that is what I am using for comparison. But the whole thing with the creature being draped in a large hooded robe and even walking like a ring wraith, nah! I just didn't buy that. I was waiting for Mr. Frodo to come out and wrestle the goblin. But it just didn't happen, unfortunately. The goblin looked really badly animated and it there was never a doubt of this being cheap CGI in my mind. The goblin looked like something from a 80's movie, it was an eyesore.

As for the acting in "Goblin", well then the actors and actresses were actually doing a well enough job with their roles and what they had to work with. Of course, there is no award-winning performances to be found here, but on the plus side, it is better than what have been seen in other SyFy movies previously.

The movie is labeled as a fantasy, horror and sci-fi. Well I can understand the fantasy part well enough, but the horror and sci-fi? Not so much. The movie wasn't scary, not in the least.

The good part of "Goblin" was that there was a good constant flow to the story, and you never really were left to be bored. Plus there were some nice moments in the story along the way as well. But these were hardly enough to lift the movie up from being under average. Having seen the movie now, I can say that it is not a movie that I will be making a second trip back to watch.