The title seems to place BEASTIES among the ranks of GREMLINS and GHOULIES, but there's really little to no similarity. The 99-cent alien "beasties" are really of little concern here, and an anarchistic punk cult is actually the main focus.
That being said, the parts of the film containing the "beasties" are much more entertaining. The acting is uniformly horrific, but the bespectacled hero and the punk Hammerhead stand out the most. The hero spouts deadpan, faux-scientific lines throughout, simultaneously swooning one of the on screen female characters and making everyone watching the film groan and roll their eyes.
It begins to drag a lot when the punk cult is given the main role, and even the director seemed to notice this, as he introduces random characters that do nothing but run around and get scared by things to break up the monotony of the cult scenes. But the first 70 minutes is still filled with terrible fight choreography, catfights to the death, a crappy goth-rock band, and cheap aliens getting hit with frying pans. Needless to say, it's a good time.
In the last ten minutes, the writer suddenly had delusions of grandeur, introducing twist after twist as to why the "beasties" exist. I'm still not sure how the main character, the aliens and the punk cult all intertwine, but I'm fairly confident nobody involved in the film did either. Some of the writing here was actually mildly clever; too bad it was wasted on such a dump of a film.
Not a bad film classic, but actually comes close. Cheese lovers will have a slight feast.
