Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Robert Picardo and John Glover

[content warning: potential transphobia, sexual assault]

Plot:

Several years, after the original Gremlins movie, Gizmo the Mogwai’s elderly caretaker dies and his shop is bulldozed to make way for a fancy commercial center. Taken to Clamp Tower in Manhattan by a research scientist, he is freed by his friend Daniel Peltzer, who is now working as an artist in the building. When an accident causes a new group of gremlins to be created, Daniel must try to convince his skeptical bosses that a horde of chaotic creatures is about to descend upon the highly automated “smart building.”

Nostalgia:

This is yet another of my family’s seemingly endless collection of movies taped off of basic cable during the early 90s. We only had this one, not the original, so I never ended up seeing it until much after this one, and was positively shocked at its very different tone. I do really like the original, and appreciate its status as a classic horror-comedy, but if pressed I’d have to say that I actually enjoy this one more.

Review:

This…is a very weird movie. Now, I’ve watched some weird movies for this blog so far. I’ve seen giant worms with tentacle tongues, 3000-year-old Chinese sorcerers, suburban serial killers and kung fu disco dancing street thugs. But this might be the most deliberately strange movie I’ve seen in a long time. And I still kind of love it for that.

The original Gremlins was a horror/comedy which expertly balanced both sides of the equation, and still has some genuinely frightening scenes. This movie, on the other hand, seems almost intended as a rickroll of the audiences who went into it expecting something like the first film (and in fact, it kinda was. More on that later). About 45 minutes into the movie, it takes an abrupt left turn and abandons all pretenses at being a horror film. Instead, it becomes, essentially, a live action cartoon, getting more and more ridiculous and over-the-top with every passing minute. While in the original the gremlins were actually quite dangerous, and were a threat to the lives of everyone in the town, here they instead seem to be displaced residents of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Toontown. If left to their own devices, they’d cause just as much havoc against each other as they would against any of the humans. This feeling is reinforced by the opening of the film, where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck interrupt the credits to argue about who gets to sit on top of the 60th anniversary Warner Bros. logo. It sets the tone for the sheer wackiness that is about to ensue over the course of the film. 

Most of the chaos in the film can be laid at the feet of Christopher Lee’s character, a genetic researcher whose lab seems to be a subdivision of Acme Enterprises. Here, the gremlins go through a series of transformations that ups their variety a hundredfold over the first film, where there was little to differentiate the various individuals. Thanks to the lab’s experiments, we end up with gremlins that are bat-hybrids, part vegetable, made of electricity and, most memorably, one who is intelligent and erudite, like Marvel’s Beast, with the voice of Tony Randall. Even the new version of the original film’s villain, Spike, goes through a transformation, becoming what is essentially a D&D drider in the only real scary scene in the movie.

Once the movie passes the halfway point, many of the human characters disappear for long stretches of time, as the narrative stops to just allow the gremlins to run amok. Nowhere is this more evident than the famous fourth-wall breaking sequence. When originally projected in theaters (on film, of course – this was way before the era of digital projection), the movie suddenly stopped, as if the film had become jammed, and then tore visually on-screen. Before any audience member would have time to get up and complain, however, the shadows of two gremlins in the projection booth appeared, making increasingly elaborate shadow puppets in the light of the projector. The movie then moves to the lobby of the theater itself, where a parent is complaining to the manager about the film’s content. He sends an usher into the theater, who gets Hulk Hogan to stand up from the audience and intimidate the gremlins into restarting the movie. It’s up there with Ferris Bueller’s monologues for me in terms of fourth-wall-breaking stunts, and is the ultimate distillation of what Joe Dante was trying to do with the movie.

That being, of course, fucking with both the audience and studio’s expectations. He had initially been extremely resistant to the idea of doing a sequel to the original Gremlins, as he thought that it had a satisfying ending that didn’t justify a sequel. After trying and failing to get it up and running on their own, the studio went back to Dante and offered him triple the budget of the first film and complete creative control over the direction of the project. Still not wanting to make a sequel, but also not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, Dante instead decided to make a satire of the original movie, and of overblown Hollywood sequels in general. While I personally believe that he succeeded wildly, critics and audiences were much more split over the movie, and it ultimately lost money. 

This is an incredibly silly, over-the-top movie, even more so than I remember it being. However, it’s also a very refreshing departure from most Hollywood sequels, and I really enjoyed it.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-The movie was originally intended to have a much more villainous Ronald Clamp, which is why he’s portrayed as a combination of Ted Turner and Donald Trump. However, they found that John Glover’s performance was just so likeable that they rewrote the script to turn him into a more sympathetic character.

-When the movie was released on VHS, they replaced the fourth-wall breaking with a different scene involving the gremlins turning off the VCR and channel surfing until John Wayne scares them off. This was the version that I grew up watching, and I didn’t see the Hulk Hogan version until it was finally released on DVD. I now prefer the original, though.

-One of the transformations that I didn’t mention above is where one of the gremlins drinks a formula that makes them explicitly female, with long hair, pouty lips and noticeable breasts. While it’s never clear if the gremlins had any sexual dimorphism prior to this (they reproduce through parthenogenesis, after all), what is clear is that this trans gremlin seems to be uninterested in participating in any of the anarchy. She’s more interested in a romantic pursuit of Robert Picardo’s character, and becomes the only gremlin to survive the movie because of it. While the character is ultimately played for laughs, the laughs never come at the expense of the transition itself. Once she’s female, the movie just accepts that fact, and the humor seems to be more focused on Picardo’s character’s reactions to being romanced by a two-foot-tall lizard creature. While I don’t feel the need to knock the movie for trans representation in this instance, I do have to fault it for its use of sexual assault (specifically Gremlin-on-human) for humor. Yes, Picardo decides to go along with it in the end, but I detected a lot of overtones of Stockholm Syndrome involved.

-I now understand the gremlin repeating “Is it safe?” while he has Danny strapped to a dentist chair, a joke that always eluded me when I watched this in the 90s.

The 'Burbs

The ‘Burbs (1989)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher and Bruce Dern

[content warning: immigrant peril, paranoia, serial killers, and a rapidly-moving gif]

Plot:

When an elderly resident of his neighborhood disappears overnight, mild-mannered suburbanite Ray Peterson becomes convinced that his eccentric new neighbors are actually serial killers, and will stop at nothing to prove his suspicions.

Nostalgia:

This one is yet another cable and video store rarity that I watched quite a bit when I was in middle school. Like many of the movies that I’ve done for this project, we never actually owned a copy on either VHS or DVD, and I haven’t had a chance to watch it since the 1990s.

Review:

Man, I watched a lot of really dark movies when I was younger, didn’t I? This one might be even darker of a movie than Cloak & Dagger, despite being billed as a comedy. Heck, it even has a dream sequence that involves Satan worship and human sacrifice – in a PG movie!

That the movie was directed by Joe Dante, of Gremlins fame, isn’t very surprising in retrospect. It has that movie’s same blend of over-the-top slapstick humor and borderline-nihilistic commentary on suburban life. Unlike in Gremlins, which was a horror-comedy, this movie was clearly envisaged as a comedy first and foremost, and the darkness sits uneasily besides the laughs. And don’t get me wrong: I still found good portions of the movie to be funny, even alongside the darkness. But the two are much less expertly blended than in Dante’s previous works, and the movie suffers tonally as a result. There are wildly slapstick moments, such as when the camera zooms in and out rapidly in the style of a cartoon on Hanks’s Peterson and his neighbor/co-conspirator as they find what they assume is a human femur, juxtaposed with scenes detailing the disintegration of Peterson’s marriage as he becomes more and more obsessed.

There’s also a very lengthy scene which descends into some really awkward cringe comedy, a style that I barely tolerate at the best of times and has actively made me leave the theater for a few minutes out of discomfort in the past. Basically, the wives of the conspiracy theorists convince their husbands to knock on the creepy neighbors’ door with cookies and invite themselves in for a chat. What follows is five minutes of uncomfortable silence and awkward questions, culumating in Bruce Dern’s character Rumsfield flat-out accusing the Klopeks of murder to their face. I didn’t end up muting the movie or fast-forwarding, but it was a close thing.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy this rewatch. I actually found a lot of the humor to be still quite funny, and managed to catch several jokes now that I’d never understood in the 90s (most notably an extended homage to the cinematography of the climactic gunfight in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, only with a poodle as one of the combatants). But I did see the seams much more on this rewatch than I ever had before.

Nowhere was this more notable than the ending of the movie, which has a major problem that undercuts the movie’s own message, which has only gotten worse with today’s current political and social climate involving immigrants. Though the narrative never actually identifies them as such, the Klopeks’ names and accents codes them as Eastern European immigrants, on a street otherwise comprised entirely of stereotypical white Midwesterners. The movie is very quick to Other them, with their unkempt yard, odd behavior and unwillingness to engage with their fellow suburbanites. Even before the elderly neighbor disappears, Peterson and his friends are clearly scared and suspicious of them.

At the end of the movie, after Peterson’s meddling has resulted in the destruct of the Klopeks’ house from a gas main explosion, it is revealed that Dr. Klopek is a well-known, respected pathologist, and that the elderly neighbor was taken to the hospital during the middle of the night by his family and is in fact still alive. Peterson has a very public crisis of conscious, berating all of his neighbors for letting their suspicion and mistrust of somebody different run wild, before attacking his own former best friend and being taken away in an ambulance.

If the movie had ended there, it would have had a perfectly fine resolution in my opinion. However, the movie has to add one final twist to the proceedings: sure, Peterson was wrong about the murder of his neighbor, but he was right about the Klopeks being serial killers. Dr. Klopek assumes that Peterson had found the evidence before the house blew up, and attempts to murder him on the way to the hospital. Peterson manages to fight him off as his gurney goes careening down the middle of the street, and the Klopeks are arrested when the trunk of their car is revealed to contain dozens of skeletons.

This has the effect of completely undercutting and undoing everything about Peterson’s earlier speech. As the movie ends, it appears that not only were all of his suspicions and paranoia justified, but that he’s going to get away with multiple counts of trespassing, breaking and entering and property destruction without any consequences to himself or his co-conspirators. I remembered the ending from the last time I’d watched it, of course, but I hadn’t remembered Peterson’s big speech. The thing is, everything he says is completely right. The movie just discards it for a shock and an action climax.

So yes, this movie was still fairly funny, but has some significant problems, especially with the ending, that have just gotten more apparent in the last twenty years. I didn’t find it flat-out offensive, but I was definitely giving it the side-eye quite a bit.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C+/B-, depending on how generous I’m feeling about the ending.

Stray Thoughts:

-Originally, the ending was actually going to be even darker. Apparently, Dr. Klopek was originally supposed to kill Peterson in the ambulance and get away with it.

-The street used for this movie would later become the Wisteria Lane neighborhood in Desperate Housewives.

-I managed to go the entire movie without ever once thinking about Rear Window, which is I guess a credit to the screenwriter. “Rear Window, but as a comedy” is actually a pretty good elevator pitch for this movie.

Innerspace

 

Innerspace (1987)

Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan and Martin Short

Plot:

 An experiment in miniaturization is interrupted by a gang of corporate raiders attempting to steal the technology.  One scientist escapes, and ends up injecting the test pilot, intended for a rabbit, into the body of a grocery store clerk.  The pilot is able to establish communications with him, and together they have to retrieve the technology from the thieves so that he can be re-enlarged before his oxygen runs out.

Nostalgia:

I could’ve sworn I’d seen this only a couple of years ago.  However, my movie-watching spreadsheet (which I’ve been keeping since 2008) says that I haven’t watched it in that timespan.  It’s not one that I’d watched a whole lot as a kid, but it’s one I was familiar enough with to remember a lot of the plot beats, and some of the bigger scenes.

Re-Watch:

Okay, this is more like it.  Unlike The Last Starfighter and Short Circuit, the previous two films I’ve reviewed for this project, Innerspace really holds up as an entertaining movie in its own right separate from the nostalgia.  The plot moves quickly, the performances are great across the board, and the effects are stupendous – not just by the standards of the 1980s, but I’d say even now.  But more on that later.

Like Short Circuit, this movie is meant to be an action comedy.  Despite the former film featuring a robot as a central character, I’d actually say this movie reads as more “sci-fi”.  Besides the miniaturized pilot, played by Dennis Quaid as a mild “likeable asshole” who is, in fact, quite likeable, there’s a hitman with a prosthetic arm that doubles as a gun and a blowtorch, and a microwave device that Quaid uses to blow up a TV (Quaid’s disgusted “I’m inside a guy who likes game shows” got me to laugh out loud).  The comedy is mostly centered on Martin Short as the clerk, who gives off a Gene Wilder vibe as the neurotic, hypochondriac, supremely lacking in self-confidence man that Quaid gets stuck inside.  His reactions and physical humor had me laughing out loud more than I have while watching a movie alone in quite a while.  Especially so in a bravura sequence of physical comedy in which Quaid uses muscle stimulation to transform Short’s face into the other sublimely silly character from the movie, the fantastic Robert Picardo’s “Cowboy”.

Just one of the many facial gyrations Short goes through

Now, it’s fairly obvious that Picardo is supposed to be playing a vaguely Middle Eastern character, from the accent, the fact that he’s reading a magazine printed in Arabic, and the casual script references to his selling secrets in the Persian Gulf.  However, his character is dressed as an incredibly ridiculous, stereotypical Texan (this being the era of <i>Dallas</i>), and the movie never goes into anything specific about his background.  I had a much easier time accepting his character than Fisher Stevens’s in <i>Short Circuit</i>. It helps that Picardo is also a gifted comedian, and he practically steals the show every moment he’s on-screen.

The Ewings called.  They want their wardrobe back.

Speaking of stealing the show, this movie is packed full of wonderful character actors playing small parts, a large number of which have subsequently appeared on Star Trek shows.  Besides the aforementioned Picardo, William Schallert (Short’s doctor), Henry Gibson (his boss), Andrea Martin (the lady whom he talks to in the waiting room), Kenneth Tobey (the man who observes Short talking to “himself” in the restroom), and Dick Miller (the cabbie who picks up Quaid’s girlfriend) had all appeared in DS9 episodes (Martin actually played Quark’s mother Ishka, and I recognized her without the Ferengi makeup).  The lady from Short’s dream sequence was also played by Kathleen Freeman, whom I remember from her memorable cameo as the stern nun from the Blues Brothers movies, the first of which will hopefully be a future review.

Besides the comedy, which I definitely remembered, there’s also a lot more action in the movie than I had recalled.  There’s a car vs. bicycle chase at the beginning that works better than it has a right to, several fistfights, and a sequence in the middle, involving Short hanging off the back of a truck door while the vehicle was moving, that reminded me of stuff I’ve seen in Jackie Chan movies.  I’m sure that a lot of it was done with a stunt double, but the part that had him balancing precariously on the edge of a convertible’s windshield as it’s driving definitely looked like he’d done it himself.

Which brings me back around, finally, to the movie’s effects.  This film won that year’s Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and it’s easy to see why.  The sequences with Quaid inside Short’s body look outstanding.  The film was clearly influenced by Fantastic Voyage, and the effects crews took full advantage of the opportunity to reimagine what the inside of the body would look like up close.  Everything was done practically, and I really can’t imagine it looking much better even with the addition of CG.

So yeah, this one’s definitely a keeper.  The only thing that truly dates this movie is a five minute sequence in a nightclub that just screams mid-late 80s, down to the Madonna inspired wardrobes and Wang Chung music.  It deserves to be better known than it is, and is one to check out if you’re interested in seeing Martin Short at the peak of his game, a really young Meg Ryan, and some gorgeous model, miniature and composite work.

Nostalgia: B

Rewatch: A-