Are you kidding me? 2.5 star average? Perhaps Girlfriend from Hell is receiving ratings from people who only watch full cinematic comedies, perhaps I'm an old crony who still likes his films fun, but I've thought Girlfriend From Hell was great fun since I first saw it in the 90s.
A group of young adults attending a small birthday party are planning to set the debilitatingly shy Maggie up with Carl, a young man so shy he can barely talk without wanting to vomit from nerves. Things take a supernatural turn when the spirit of the devil enters Maggie's body while running from a pursuer, turning her into the life, and death, of the party. It's up to devil chaser to restore Maggie to normal and save her friends, but having the devil inside her for a day might be just what the doctor ordered for Maggie's crippling insecurity...
The Good: Dana Ashbrook and Liane Curtis steal the show. Ashbrook is a criminally underrated actor, made famous by Twin Peaks but really not showing up as often as he should, and rarely gets a chance to be funny like he was here. To me he'll always be Chaser. Liane Curtis, well, I've seen her in pretty much nothing else, maybe Critters 2, but she does a great job here. The soundtrack is great too, with a combination of pop-punk songs and chugging synths so representative of the tail-end of the 80s.
The Bad: The rest of the cast are pretty ho-hum. Other characters aren't fleshed out like Chaser and the devil are, and the majority of the film seems to take place within the same house party. The cartoonishly violent relationship between two supporting characters is hilarious, but the same joke is then transferred to Dana Ashbrook's character and another supporting character, the movie then overuses the same 'man does something perverted, woman responds with cartoon violence' joke lifted straight out of a Japanese anime.
The Straight-To-Video: The camera work, not that I noticed this in my teens, is typical of a straight-to-video film, essentially just pointing at what you need to see, without any particular effort to frame it well or achieve the right dramatic effect. At times it can give the feel of a home video. The special effects, while cheesy, are impressive for something with such a low budget, with appropriately some gory corpses and even a brief "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" moment using a giant cheese-puff. For a movie about a being chasing the devil herself (HERself) across time and space, it all seems quite small scale, really, with only a few locations in the film. The house, a restaurant, the street, and a short trip to a canyon is about as far as it goes.
Unfortunately, while this used to be a bargain for a cheap VHS, there is no DVD, so I can only recommend it to retro VHS aficionados, Dana Ashbrook fans, or those nostalgic for the original release. If you aren't still rocking the VHS, head to twisted danger dot net where they produce a DVD disk of the film.
