Goobers! (1997)
AKA Mystery Monsters
Starring Ashley Tesoro, Tim Redwine, Caroline Ambrose, Sam Zeller, Daniel Hartley, Michael Dennis, Michael Citriniti, Tom Thomson
Directed by Charles Band
Expectations: None.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
When I picked up Goobers! from the Redbox kiosk, I did so with a resigned attitude. As I venture through all of these Full Moon features, so many of them are less than awesome and so far their films for kids (under the Moonbeam label) have been some of the more trying entries in the series. Before I watched Goobers!, I tried looking it up on IMDB and quickly found out that the film had been released before under the title Mystery Monsters. It had apparently been a Blockbuster exclusive release and was edited down to a paltry fifty-three minutes. So at long last in 2012, Full Moon has unleashed these mystery monsters onto the unknowing public in their uncut, eighty-one minute glory. While you might expect this to lead to a film filled with fat that needs to be trimmed, Goobers! is anything but. It remained funny and entertaining throughout for this B-Movie fan, and if you’re similarly minded I think you’ll enjoy it as well.
The film opens with the taping of the hit kid’s program, Cap’n Mike’s Goobers Show! Tommy is the new kid on the set, and his curiosity about special FX and puppets leads him to question how the goobers are manipulated and created. He is told in no uncertain terms to mind his own business, but ever the intrepid sleuth, Tommy bores a hole in his dressing room wall with a pocket knife (don’t try this at home, kiddos!) and observes Mike and the goobers playing poker and smoking together. Mike is anything but kind to the goobers and keeps them locked in the magical trunk he stole from the evil Queen Mara.