The Galactic Ghoul

A lovingly crafted space opera pastiche which harks back to the glory days of matinée serials, Simon Harrisson’s The Galactic Ghoul was practically made for a Fantasia audience – not least because it’s also very Canadian. Whether or not it will work at all for other audiences remains to be seen. It requires quite a bit of immersion in specific media to fully appreciate it, yet the weaknesses in its narrative and dialogue are in large part compensated for by the elegance of its design.

True, this may not look elegant to the untrained eye. Harrisson’s interest clearly lies in art rather than commercial potential. Whilst it’s easy now to generate flashy effects and dazzling backdrops using computers, he and his team chose to do all their work using hand-made models and greenscreens. It took eight years for them to complete the job, with its cratered planetary surfaces, imperial palace, flying saucers and incredibly cute little aliens (including one made out of origami). This may look less ‘realistic’ but it is, at the same time, more believable. It is a universe with soul.

Travelling through this universe is our eyepatch-wearing, elaborately garbed hero, Captain Oscar Bravo, son of Mars, son of the she-wolf (played by Vincent Hoss-Desmarais). He’s a wildly ambitious man, backed by soldiers Foxtrot (also Hoss-Desmarais, for reasons which will become apparent) and Xenon (Michael Richard). When a miscalculation leads to them landing on the wrong planet, they find themselves in serious peril, but the Captain manages to make off with a precious relic: a stone whose incredible powers have had people on its trail for countless ages. This is, incidentally, one of few non-manufactured props in the film: it’s an actual rock, and large enough for poor Hoss-Desmarais to have put his back out hefting it around.

The rock is the perfect gift for the tyrant Queen Xaltalusia XXIII (Katherine Isabelle), who rules half the known universe. The Captain still has to endure two years’ hard labour for his temerity in landing on her home turf, but once he gets the chance to meet her socially, everything changes. His plan is to seduce her and thereby seat himself on the imperial throne. It doesn’t quite go the way he had in mind, but potential viewers may be assured that there is plenty of adventure ahead.

How well you get along with it overall will depend on how you feel about parody. It is at its best when actually being creative on its own terms. The dialogue designed to sound bad may be cute for a little while but soon gets wearing. It undermines the sense of character sincerity necessary to get one to invest in this sort of stuff. That matters all the more because the film is overlong; its visual ideas don’t have sufficient plot to back them up, and one gets the sense that Harrisson couldn’t bear to cut as many out as he ought to have done.

What does bolster the dialogue, and some aspects of the plot and performances (which are decent enough anyway) is the film’s satirical comment on Canadian imperialism, with pompous characters in Xaltalusia’s court whose particular approach to social climbing will be instantly recognisable to people from those territories. If that’s you, you should probably consider this rating to be half a star higher. It does not translate well internationally, but that’s not to fault it: niche art has its place. Furthermore, anyone with a half decent grounding in film technique will find things to admire here, whether or not it works for them as casual viewing.

Reviewed on: 02 Aug 2026