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.

Tremors

Tremors (1990)

Dir. by Ron Underwood

Starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter and Michael Gross

Plot:

The residents of the isolated desert town of Perfection, Nevada, including two handymen, a geologist grad student, and a survivalist couple, come under attack by giant worm creatures that hunt them through vibrations in the ground.

Nostalgia:

I honestly can’t recall the first time I saw this.  It must have been on TV, as we didn’t have it on VHS until I was in high school (I taped it off of cable).  It’s just one of those movie’s that always been there in my life.  I know I watched it while I was in college, but I don’t think I’ve seen it since then.

Review:

I’ve never been a huge horror movie watcher.  I’ve always been interested in the genre, dating back to when I used to go into the video store as a kid (remember when they had those?) and look at all of the gloriously 80s box art in the section I wasn’t allowed to rent from.  But as for actually watching the movies, I’ve always seemed to prefer to read about them, and watch clips on Youtube, rather than actually sit through them in theaters.  The one big exception has always been monster movies.  From werewolves to Cthulhu, I’ve always enjoyed a good creature feature (except for zombies.  Never been a big zombie fan).

The Graboids in Tremors certainly weren’t the first monsters I ever encountered in movies.  There were a lot of monsters in the fantasy movies I grew up with, after all, from the two-headed dragon in Willow to the Ceti eels in Wrath of Khan (which gave me nightmares when I was eight).  But they were probably the most memorable one of my childhood, as they were really unlike anything else I’d ever seen before*.  Giant eyeless worm things with mouths full of tentacles, which had their own mouths – not something you encounter every day.  They were doubly impressive this time around as I realized that not only were they done entirely practically, but very frequently at full-size.  There’s just something about having an actual thirty foot long monster on-screen, a tactile presence that’s so often lacking in modern monster movies.

Now THAT's a monster

I also forgot just how much this movie is a horror comedy.  In my mind, it’s always been a horror film first and foremost, sharing the same headspace as things like Anaconda, where the humor was entirely unintentional.  Instead, it’s closer to something like Arachnophobia.  I guess the very fact that the monsters are given the name “Graboids” should have clued me in to the movie not taking itself too seriously.  Sure, a lot of people get eaten in this movie.  But it also has an endless stream of banter between the handymen Earl and Val, as well as one of the few actually enjoyable right-wing NRA enthusiasts that I can name off-hand. It’s not a coincidence that Michael Gross’s gun-toting Burt Gummer would become the star of the long-running direct-to-DVD sequel series, as he frequently manages to steal the movie from Kevin Bacon, which is no easy feat.

About the only situation where I can get behind one of these guys nowadays

Speaking of Kevin Bacon, this is probably the first encounter with the legendary Earth hero.  Either this, or The Air Up There, which I barely remember and probably won’t cover here because I’d just be yelling about cultural imperialism the whole review.  Anyway, he’s in fine form here, as a guy who’s already sick of his dead-end job in the middle of nowhere even before giant worms start eating the place.  In addition to the aforementioned Michael Gross, Reba McEntire is also actually a pleasant surprise as Burt’s wife and fellow survivalist, in what I believe was her first acting role.  She’s presented as being Burt’s equal, and the script allows her to give her husband gun advice and to open fire on the Graboids with double pistols, and never comments once on her gender. 

Bacon’s love interest, the geologist Rhonda, is also given a lot of agency.  She uses her scientific expertise to come up with a lot of the info that they use to evade and defeat the monsters, and she’s the one who comes up with the pole-vaulting technique to get them off the rock that they’re trapped on early in the film.  It’s just refreshing to see a monster movie in which none of the female characters are ever portrayed as damsels in distress, even when they are in distress.

Tremors wasn’t hugely successful at the box office despite good critical reviews, but it went on to be a huge cult classic on cable and home video, and spawned five direct-to-DVD sequels and a short-lived TV series, of varying quality.  As with many horror franchises, however, the original entry is still definitely the best one, and it held up for me just as much as it did when I was growing up.  I’m actually a little sad that I went almost fifteen years without seeing it, as it could easily slip into my regular DVD watching rotation.

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

*Yes, I’m familiar with Dune’s sandworms, and Beetlejuice’s as well.  But I didn’t read Dune until college and still haven’t seen the movie, and Beetlejuice’s monsters were very cartoony stop motion animation, and really aren’t comparable at all to the Graboids.

-If “Graboids” wasn’t enough to clue you in that this is a horror comedy, the sequels have “Ass-Blasters.”  Just try saying that out loud with a straight face.

The Monster Squad

Seriously? "A monster-ous good time" was the
best tag line they could come up with?

The Monster Squad (1987)

Dir. by Fred Dekker

Starring Andre Gower, Duncan Regehr and Tom Noonan

[content warning: brief mentions of homophobic jokes, concentration camps]

Plot:

A club of monster movie-obsessed pre-teens learns that monsters are real when Dracula comes to their town, accompanied by the other Universal horror monsters, in search of a mystical amulet that will give him the power to permanently upset the balance between good and evil.

Nostalgia:

I grew up watching this movie.  I don’t consciously recall seeing the original Universal horror movies until I was in college, so this was almost certainly my cinematic introduction to Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man and others.  In recent years, my family has embraced The Monster Squad in the way that a lot of millennials have Hocus Pocus.  We watch it every Halloween after trick or treating ends.

Review:

Continuing with this unplanned series of mid-80s “kids in serious danger” movie reviews, we have The Monster Squad.  This one is nestled right in the “cult classic” zone, neither as widely beloved as The Goonies or little-known as Cloak & Dagger.   It’s actually very heavily inspired by The Goonies, from the mix of personalities in the club to the life-threatening dangers they have to face along the way.  Mary Ellen Trainor (the mom in The Goonies) even plays the mother of the main character here.  However, I think that the supernatural plot differentiates it sufficiently enough for the film to stand apart from its influences.

Speaking of influences, the movie leans very hard on a familiarity with monster movies in general and the Universal horror pictures of the 30s-50s in particular, while also being a PG-13 movie marketed at a demographic much younger than the average horror aficionado.  This leads to an odd unevenness of tone, where the movie veers wildly from comedy to horror and back again.  It contains both graphic sequences where characters get blown up with dynamite, and a scene where one of the kids kicks the Wolf Man in the groin and is surprised that he’s “got nards!”  However, I think that this shifting of tone makes a little more sense when you realize that the movie was an early script by Shane Black, whose Lethal Weapon pulled off the same thing much more successfully earlier the same year.  Many of his scripts, such as Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, display a similar mix of serious action and humorous banter.  It’s just that this one involves kids, so I feel that there was an inclination for him to go with what he perceived as a more “juvenile” sense of humor, which only serves to heighten the clash in tones.

Scary monsters and silly parents: a study in contrasts

That isn’t to say, of course, that I don’t appreciate the humor or writing.  I actually find the dialogue and interactions between the various Squad members to be very believable, and quite true to how 12-year-olds might have actually acted in the mid-late 80s (I’d like to say that I know that from experience, but I was only five years old when this movie came out).  Of course, that also means that there’s a current of true-to-the-period casual homophobia in some of their insults to each other.  Also, the sole PoC in the movie (which is doubly glaring given that it’s obviously set somewhere in the American South) is the skeptic cop who doesn’t take anything that’s going on seriously, and gets blown up to start the “shit gets real” finale.

Finally, I want to take a moment to praise the design and portrayal of the various monsters in the movie.  While the style of werewolf used isn’t my favorite – I never felt that the Universal Wolf Man read as a “wolf” all that much without any sort of actual muzzle – the makeup itself and the transformation sequences are quite well done, if a little short.  The movie’s Frankenstein (which they accurately identify as being the name of his creator, not the monster, and then go ahead and use for him anyway) evokes the classic Boris Karloff makeup while being updated for then-modern techniques.  And the version of the Creature From the Black Lagoon makeup created for this movie is perhaps the best fishman creature makeup pre-Shape of Water.   While the lead villain, Dracula, is saddled with a fairly cheesy costume taken right out of the Bela Lugosi movies, Duncan Regehr gives it his all, bringing a subdued, quiet menace to every scene.  He’s actually one of my favorite portrayals of Dracula in any movie.

You know, the Mummy doesn't really do much in the movie. 
He's just here so he won't get fined.

So yeah, looked back on as an adult, I can see how the movie has a bit of a tone issue, and how some of the horror elements had to be toned down to make this into a family-friendly movie.  However, there’s still a lot to like about the movie.  Certainly enough to where it deserves a place alongside Hocus Pocus as a cult Halloween movie.

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-It’s clear that the creatures themselves weren’t all that they studied about the classic Universal movies when making Monster Squad.  In the original Bela Lugosi Dracula, Dracula’s castle was populated by armadillos (native to North America) instead of rats, and hyenas instead of wolves.  Sure enough, in the first scene of Monster Squad, Dracula wakes up from his crypt in Transylvania and two armadillos go running off in the background.

-This is yet another movie with a couple of significant Star Trek connections.  Duncan Regehr (Dracula) was Shakaar on DS9, and the main character’s dad, Stephen Macht, was also on the show in the three-parter that opened season two.

-The reveal that the “scary German guy” that all of the neighborhood kids are afraid of, and whom they reluctantly turn to for help, is actually a concentration camp survivor is not done particularly subtly.  However, given how young I was when I first saw this, I’m not sure I actually understood the implications of the number on his arm for some time.

-[minor spoilers for the general plot concept of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn (highlight to read)]: This movie starts with an opening crawl that ends “a small band of freedom fighters conspired to rid the world of vampires and monsters and to save mankind from the forces of eternal evil…..They blew it.”  Every time I pitch the plot of Mistborn to a prospective reader, I use pretty much this exact phrasing, minus the vampires part.

-“Wolfman’s got nards!”