Goblin - O Sacrifício

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")

Sometimes it's best to review a film before it completely slips from your memory. This is one such time. I can't really think of anything really bad about 2010's 'Goblin,' but then I can't think of anything particularly positive to say about it. I guess that's why it's probably the definition of mediocre.

Long ago, blah, blah, blah, supernatural shenanigans, blah, blah, blah, now we have a monster running round the woods killing people. And we have our horror movie.

Only the 'horror' element doesn't really start until around the halfway mark. The first forty-five minutes are all taken up with 'character growth,' only the characters aren't that special. In fact, the lead actress plays quite an unlikable teenage girl who you'll find it hard to root for. The others are your typical horror movie stereotypes. If you've ever seen another similar film you'll know exactly who will live and who will die. All dialogue within the first fifteen minutes is basically exposition and the addition of an old local man who delivers a warning to the main cast adds to the cliches.

At least the second half picks up a bit when the goblin itself makes more appearances. There's not much in the way of gore, but the creature is actually quite nicely designed, so props there, I guess. But the film just seems to feel far longer than its ninety minute runtime. Granted I was watching it on a streaming service, but every time I paused it and saw how far through I was I expected to be half to three quarters of the way through, only to find that either twenty or thirty minutes had passed.

Weirdly, my main gripe came about halfway through when I realised that, despite it being set on Halloween, most scenes took place during the day. Granted, the climax was filmed at night, but I don't think I've ever seen a film set around this time that's supposed to be scary and have it filmed on a nice warm afternoon.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Like I say, it's not a bad film - there's just so many that do far better with equal or less of a budget. Watch it if there's nothing else, but don't expect anything too memorable.

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.

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.

Typical of the entries in the Sci-Fi scheme of things is this tale of an ancient curse being perpetuated on a small town where danger lurks in the woods whenever Halloween approaches.

GIL BELLOWS is the father who takes his family to a rustic cabin for a vacation, accompanied by a teen-aged daughter (TRACY SPIRIDAKOS) and her giggling friend (CAMILLE SULLIVAN), along with wife and baby. He meets a few of the townspeople and we're aware that something is out of kilter--there's a secret being held behind closed doors and we know the family is in immediate danger.

That's the set-up, accompanied by lots of exposition about witches and an ancient curse involving human sacrifice, with the story set just before and during another Halloween. Actually, the script is fairly good at developing the characters (for a change), the photography is very striking, and the acting on a generally higher level than you'd expect in this sort of horror film. There's some bloody gore to satisfy fans who crave the sight of injuries inflicted on innocent victims.

The goblin creature itself is kept shrouded in a dark cloak most of the time and when revealed is a pretty frightening sight, with all due respect to CGI effects. The music is creepy and the atmosphere of dread takes on a stronger feel for the last part of the story, which takes a little too long to set up the whole thing.

After a dull beginning, not too bad but could have been more tightly paced.