Ghetto Goblin

Cheesy fun from South Africa with an all-black cast. It's a Zulu story about a monster on the loose with various other characters like a priest and an unscrupulous businessman involved. Total trash of course, but mildly amusing with it.

A South African horror film, it takes a strong basis in what, I presume, can accurately be described as their own folk traditions. However, there's definitely elements of this that seem a bit familiar when compared to more well-known horror films, and several of the dynamics in the film seem fairly reminiscent of vampire movies, the proper Dracula kind. This isn't the sort of lazy B-movie horror film that can get passed around and watched over pizza making fun of it, this really is the sort of horror film that has such a polished look to it (although a couple performances felt a bit more wooden, but that may be how I hear the accents) and a well-crafted storyline that it definitely deserves to be watched in a theater, and if this was in English, I'd say this would be well in line to be another of the pantheon of horror classics one day. The greatest issue is the subtitles, as there are lines that don't quite make sense, and that I presume mark points where things were incorrectly translated, but those were relatively few in number. The imagery of the film is quite strong, and I think that is often a key point in horror films, and it also certainly seems to take note from many past movies, things like Jaws, in knowing that there's no reason to go out of your way to show things when you can let people's minds do the work for you. This isn't what I'd consider the very top tier of horror films, but it certainly does what it does far better than many films considered horror classics, and it's quite interesting to see the similarities between this and American horror films.