Hobgoblins

A young man named Kevin takes a job as a night watchman at a closed-down movie studio, where an older employee, McCreedy, warns him to stay away from a sealed vault on the property. Kevin opens it anyway and releases a group of hobgoblins that have been locked inside for around thirty years. The creatures make people act out their fantasies, and the experience proves fatal for those involved. Kevin and his friends have to capture the hobgoblins before sunrise, or the town will be in danger.

The film is a comedy, horror and science fiction mix written, produced and directed by Rick Sloane, made by his company Rick Sloane Productions. It was the first of the two features he directed, followed the next year by Vice Academy, so it stands at the very start of his filmography as a director. Tom Bartlett plays Kevin, with Paige Sullivan as Amy, Steven Boggs as Kyle, Kelley Palmer as Daphne, Billy Frank as Nick and Tamara Clatterbuck as Fantazia.

Released in the summer of 1988, the film runs eighty-eight minutes and is set in and around the studio where the vault is kept. Audiences have received it poorly: on IMDb it holds a rating of 2.3 out of 10 across roughly 13,000 votes, and on TMDB it sits at 3.6 out of 10 from a much smaller number of votes. The two audiences agree on little beyond a low opinion of the film, with the far larger IMDb sample judging it more harshly.