The Ghouls

2003 "If it bleeds it leads."
3.8| 1h21m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 06 November 2003 Released
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Budget: 0
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Eric Hayes is a stringer. One notch below the lowest rung of the journalistic ladder. A video vulture preying on police chases, ambulance runs, and random street violence, selling his footage to the highest bidder and living on a steady diet of cigarettes and bloodlust. For years, Eric has lived off of other people's pain and misery. But he's about to discover something beneath the streets of Los Angeles even hungrier for blood than he is. He's about to discover THE GHOULS.

Genre

Horror

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Director

Chad Ferrin

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The Ghouls Audience Reviews

GamerTab That was an excellent one.
Nonureva Really Surprised!
Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.
Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
MBunge Instead of making this movie, writer/director Chad Ferrin could have saved himself a lot of trouble and just worn a big sandwich board around his neck and wrote on it "I have no idea what I'm doing". This is the sort of painfully cheap film that when characters try to walk across the street, they have to stop and let actual traffic go through the scene, so it's already got a couple strikes against it. The inept drudgery of Ferrin's storytelling adds another 87 strikes, sending The Ghouls not just down and out but deep into some nebulous underworld of sucky cinema.Eric Hayes (Timothy Muskatell) is a drunk and a four-pack-a-day smoker trying to eak out a living as a freelance video cameraman. Now, it's immediately obvious when Ferrin wrote this script he had no idea how the TV news business works or what news cameramen actually do, so he basically casts Hayes as some kind of news paparazzo who wanders around Hollywood hoping to get good footage to sell to the highest bidder. That's not what happens in the real world. I know it's a little thing, but failing to do even the most rudimentary research on what he's writing about really symbolizes Ferrin's sloppy efforts here.Anyway, in between obsessing over his ex-girlfriend and trying to sponge off everyone he meets, Hayes stumbles upon the story of a lifetime. He discovers the mean streets of Hollywood after dark have become the hunting ground for albino cannibals. Recruiting a fellow "news paparazzo" for help, Hayes sets out to get video of these ghouls. The rest of the tale is essentially just a bunch of bang-your-head-against-the-wall stupid stuff happening before an ending where it appears Ferrin is working out a grudge against a retarded cousin he never liked.There's so much crap to go over with The Ghouls. At least 30% of the movie appears to be random footage that Ferrin shot in downtown LA at night and then edited together to make his script stretch out to 81 minutes. There's a series of flashbacks where Ferrin displays a clear nipple fetish. A character wears a wig for absolutely no reason. There are several points where Ferrin obviously finds Timothy Muskatell smoking to be the most fascinating image he's ever seen. Eric Hayes is portrayed as a worthless scumbag and he's the "hero" of the movie. There's a character who's supposed to have his skin ripped off but as Ferrin pans the camera across his crotch, you can unmistakably see the outline of the guy's genitals underneath the bodysuit he's wearing for the scene. He looks like one of those anatomically incorrect Ken dolls with tomato paste smeared over him. Again, I know that seems like a little thing, but all Ferrin had to do was pan the camera 5 inches higher or lower to avoid shattering the suspension of disbelief. Of course, to suspend your disbelief for longer than the first 48 seconds of this film, you'd have to be too drunk to walk.The marketplace is flooded with cheap, cruddy horror flicks. However, The Ghouls is several rungs lower than the average cheap, cruddy horror flick. There's some bargain basement gore and violence without any genuine horror or shock. Ferrin makes albino cannibals as exciting as the slides from his grandparents' trip to the Grand Canyon.Don't watch this. Even if you like cheap, cruddy horror flicks, don't watch this. Even if you've seen every other horror movie ever made, don't watch this. You'd be better off watching The Sound of Music on mute while listening to Black Sabbath.
EllenRipley112 As a fan of the zombie subset of the horror genre, I am very upset that this tried to play itself off as a zombie flick. The back cover of the DVD even says, and I quote, "A city is forced to face its worst nightmare when a *deadly mob of zombies* and flesh eating monsters emerge from below the streets and begin to feast on anyone in their path. Now, it is up to one man to battle the darkness and try to save the few remaining souls..."O---M---G. I *dream* of writing FICTION this good. Disappointed viewers like myself should be able to sue whoever wrote this copy for misrepresentation. First, we need to clear something up here. ZOMBIES, by popular definition, fit certain criteria:1. They are dead 2. They eat the living 3. They are senseless--they have one mission and one only--to eat the living. 4. They don't care about each other, they don't sleep, they don't defend themselves, they don't care about light, day or night, clothing, or other things. The aggressors in this film only meet the second criteria. This does NOT make them ZOMBIES. It also doesn't make them GHOULS--again, by definition, ghouls are grave-robbers--they eat the ALREADY-DEAD. So now we don't know WHAT these people are. Just cannibalistic freaks living in the sewers with an aversion to light. The city seems to be blissfully unaware of the flesh-eating menace among its ranks, and the ONE person Our Hero finds who DOES know, has known for sometime, and doesn't seem to even care (so the part about them "begin"ning to feast doesn't hold, because they've been doing it for years)! Second, we need to deal with this "one man", Our Hero, who seems to need to deal with his own inner darkness before he can battle what lurks the streets at night. And how does he battle it when he first finds it?? With his trusty CAMERA. Like others have said, the question the filmmakers are trying to raise here is, who is the TRUE ghoul here? He hears a woman scream for help, and gives chase--with his CAMERA. He arrives on the scene of a double murder, with terrified children in the background, and FILMS IT. His girlfriend dumps him because he filmed children in a burning building rather than try to save them, and after telling her a few thousand times that he loves her, he calls her a "b*tch" and puts a gun to her head in front of her daughter. Oh, yeah, Our Hero is WAY flawed, but not in any good, redeeming, "I can relate to him" ways. I especially felt sorry for him, when he beat up a guy that wouldn't help him, and left his unconscious body in the alley for the "flesh-eating monsters" to get, just so he could FILM IT. The saddest thing about this movie is, he never sees his own sickness until it's too late, and then he chooses not to do anything about it. Too much gore I can handle if it's part of the plot--it wasn't here. I can work around the profanity if it makes some kind of sense--it didn't. And it was bad enough two murder victims were naked--did we have to get close-ups? And it's nice to know Our Hero's fondest memories of his girlfriend while missing her involve close-ups of her various body parts. The definition of "gratuitous".
robbiedoo Looking around on the internet, one will get mixed reviews for this independent film. Some comments will read "horrible effects/Script/Actors", others I read said "Great effects/actors, solid script and see to believe makeup/scenes". The truth lies somewhere in the middle.I hadn't even heard of this film before plucking it off the shelf(to rent) at the video store. It's definitely not an average horror film. It includes some very unique/sloppy (you can decide) camera angles. Some shots seem too zoomed in, or perhaps not enough takes were done. The script has it's downfalls (character depth), and seems slightly, if not more, rushed. The dialog could use some work...Having said that, this movie is worth seeing. The plot starts slowly, but once one gets into it, it can surly keep one's attention. There are some gruesome scenes, and it will shock, if not scare you. An overall dark mood throughout, comparable to 28 days later(the mood), but by no means the same.If you expect to see a typical movie with this one, you're way off. Original, unique... there's definitely something here you can't get from big budget Hollywood movies. It's hard to forget about this one anytime soon after watching it.A graph of this movie would start at the bottom and end at the top... slow starting but grows and grows to something... (for lack of a better term) better.
Kieron Hazel I first caught The Ghouls on the UK horror channel. Knowing nothing about the film prior to this screening, I found myself in the happy position of discovering for myself a truly brilliant and original horror film that had me engrossed from the opening sequence of a stringer's true crime footage to the powerful, downbeat ending. Chad Ferrin constantly confounds viewer expectations, teasing out of the bleakness of his character's lives a surprising amount of sympathy for the monsters, human and otherwise, who populate his tale. In a noteworthy cast particular praise must go to Timothy Muskatell, who reminds me more and more of an exploitation movie De Niro every time I see him at work. I was impressed enough by The Ghouls to seek out more of Chad Ferrin's work. Unspeakable also comes highly recommended. The Ghouls is one of the very best horror films of the new millennium, with more to say about the human condition than anything currently emerging from the Hollywood mill. An important film by an important film-maker. Chad Ferrin is one to watch.