I really like Todd Sheets, because he seems like someone just as willing to passionately discuss his favorite Fulci movie as he is someone ready to make something astounding like Moonchild. He may not be the biggest fan of this movie and sees a lot he could have done better — or so he says — but I had a blast watching it. It made me feel like when I was a teenager and all I cared about was reading Fangoria and driving to other towns to find mom and pop video stores with different libraries of horror movies than the ones I’d exhausted around me.

This movie is exactly what I was looking for.

The plot is simple but that’s just to get the creature into our world and killing everyone he can. A farmer named Romero once wanted his crops to do better so he tried some magic and ended up with, well, a goblin. So he dropped it in a well and years later, when a young couple buys the place, they accidentally unleash it, as you do, and things go wrong for everyone and right for you, the viewer.

So yeah, I would have been 21 when this came out and that was the perfect time for me to enjoy Fulci references, heavy metal soundtracks and people just randomly showing up and trying to speak dialogue that they are ill-prepared to deliver and they still end up sounding like every art school party I ever attended with the cheapest bottle of vodka in my hand.

Now, wondering like why a goblin needs a drill to take out someone’s eyeball is the kind of thing that people wonder about when they get too intellectual about movies like this. Other questions would be why is there so much genital mutilation and why do zombies just show up? These are dumb questions no one cares about. Stop asking questions. Stop making sense.

The goblin looks great, the music is pretty solid and the video quality is absolutely horrible. The guts look like real animal parts which is how they do it in Texas on productions big and small, but this was made in Kansas City. They have good barbecue in both places and I guess the sloppiness of the sauce on the meat translates to how grimy the guts look in horror films too. Why is this movie making me hungry instead of nauseated? Have I gone too far?

This was shot under a full moon with a video camera. That’s as perfect as life gets.

Say no to drugs. Get high on horror!