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.

Bloodsport

Bloodsport (1986)
Dir. by Newt Arnold

Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Donald Gibb and Bolo Yeung

[content warning: racist portrayals, sexual assault]

Plot:

Captain Frank Dux goes AWOL from the U.S. Army to represent his ailing martial arts instructor at the Kumite, an invitation-only underground fighting tournament held in Hong Kong.

Nostalgia:

I remember hearing about this movie several times before I eventually saw it. I know I didn’t actually watch it until after I started taking Tae Kwon Do, so probably some time in early high school would be my guess. Yet again, it’s one of our many VHS tapes that didn’t make the transition to DVD, though I have seen it a handful of times in the last decade or so.

Review:

For a brief moment there, it looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme was going to be the next big action star. He was an actual full-contact karate and kickboxing competitor, so he had the martial arts chops to pull off the moves on screen, and for some reason wooden, European-accented actors were all the rage for action movies during the 80s (see: Arnold, Christopher Lambert, Dolph Lundgren, etc). This low-budget Cannon movie would be his big breakout role, and he’d go on to a whole string of low- to mid-budget action movies in the 1990s, until he just suddenly disappeared after Universal Soldier: The Return in 1999.

I’ll admit to actually having a bit of a soft spot for his movies, especially cheesy yet enjoyable crap from the mid-90s like Timecop and Sudden Impact. This, however, might be his best performance from an action standpoint. He was still close enough to his fighting days to be in amazing physical condition, and it shows in the moves that he’s able to pull off on-camera (when he does the splits with his feet suspended on chairs in one scene, that’s not a camera trick. Another character even remarks “That hurts me just looking at it”). While he would learn to relax and be better in the dialogue scenes as his career went on, here they’re all kind of hard to watch. However, most of the scenes outside of the Kumite are pretty much filler, and it doesn’t really distract from what you’re here to see.

Honestly, I'm going to have to agree with Jackson on this one

Speaking of filler and the plot, this movie is basically just an extremely clichéd fighting tournament movie, the sort that any martial arts movie fan has seen a hundred times. It’s tempting to compare the movie to Enter the Dragon, but the Bruce Lee movie actually has a more complex plot than Bloodsport. There’s no undercover mission, or evil supervillain, or revenge angle to the plot (well, not initially, anyway). It’s just “man enters tournament, man’s bosses try to stop the tournament.”

No, the closest comparisons I have to this movie are actually two properties that came after, and in fact were inspired by, Bloodsport: Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. It’s got the secret, invitation-only tournament, the international cast of fighters with widely differing styles, and the villain who really likes killing people mid-fight. Those styles, in my opinion, are what elevate this movie above all of the other low-budget tournament movies I’ve seen. It’s not just all kung fu, or karate, or judo, but a mix of styles from all over the world, which keeps the fights fresh and interesting to watch. However, this does open the movie up to some criticism for the portrayals of the fighters, most especially the token African and Middle Eastern competitors. Hossein, the Arab fighter, is played by a clearly non-Arab actor, and is introduced making unwanted advances on the love interest for the movie. And the African fighter, who is never named, is shown jumping around in trees in the training montage and hops around like a monkey in the ring. For all I know it’s an actual style (it’s not capoeira – that I can recognize), but it looks pretty racist to me on first glance.

The relationship between Dux and the reporter, Janice Kent, is also a prime example of time having definitely moved on in the thirty years since the movie was made. Dux meets her at the same time as Hossein does, and “rescues” her by effectively wagering her in a (rigged) contest of skill with Hossein. Yes, Hossein gets his ass kicked by Dux in the tournament the next day, and Kent proves to be more than capable of getting herself into the no-press-allowed Kumite audience by herself. However, I don’t think that a sexual relationship with someone who’d actually been betting someone over who’d be allowed to take you up to his hotel room 24 hours earlier would fly in a modern movie.

The movie’s very, very 80s, with jokes about 8-bit arcade games and many montages (seriously, there’s like two 3+ minute montages separated from each other by barely a minute). But if you can get past that and the pretty bad dialogue and acting, there’s actually a lot of good martial arts action in this one. It’s fairly easy to see how JCVD’s action movie career got started after this.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-Another reason a lot of people think of Enter the Dragon: <i>Bloodsport</i>'s villain, Chon Li, is played by the same actor who played Han’s large, memorable henchman from the Bruce Lee movie.

-Yes, the younger of the two Army agents trying to apprehend Dux is an extremely young Forest Whitaker, only a year removed from his breakout role in Good Morning Vietnam.

-This movie bills itself as a true story, based on the exploits of the real Frank Dux. Dux is indeed a real ex-Army officer and martial artist, but he’s also a well-known teller of tall tales and none of his claims about the Kumite can be verified at all. Therefore, it’s wise to assume that the events of Bloodsport are pretty much entirely bullshit.

-I'm aware that Donald Trump once said that this is his favorite movie. Yes, it's about an American beating up foreigners. But it's also specifically about an American immigrant, something that I think he failed to notice. And anyway, why would I concern myself about his taste in movies?

Red Sonja

It’s telling that Arnold’s only in the movie for
about half an hour, yet he’s larger on the poster
than the actual lead

Red Sonja (1985)

Dir. by Richard Fleischer

Starring Brigitte Nielsen, Sandahl Bergman and Arnold Schwarzenegger

[content warning: sexual assault, evil lesbians trope]

Plot:

 A female warrior is tasked by her dying sister to recover and destroy a power magical artifact that has been stolen by an evil queen, before its power grows out of control and it destroys the world.  Along the way, she is joined by a deposed prince, his servant, and Conan the Barbarian Kalidor of Hyrkania.

Nostalgia:

This is one that we had taped off of TV sometime in the early 90s.  I watched it a couple times, but it never really caught my imagination the way even something like Beastmaster did.  I included it in a bad movie marathon that I ran in college, but I believe that was the last time I’ve seen it before this viewing.

Review:

As I discussed back in my Beastmaster review, the unexpected success of Conan the Barbarian in 1982 kicked off a sword and sorcery movie boom that lasted until the middle of the decade.  While The Beastmaster might have been the first movie out of the gate during that boom, Red Sonja just about represents the last gasp of the genre, at least for the major Hollywood studios.  It was a certified bomb at the box office, making less than half of its production budget.  While there would be fantasy films released theatrically after this (Labyrinth, Legend, The Princess Bride), there wouldn’t be another medieval-set action/fantasy movie like this until Willow, three years later.

Other than possible genre fatigue, I blame the end of the movie boom on the movies not actually being any good.  Red Sonja is an excellent example.  This movie, frankly, sucks.  It’s only 90 minutes long, yet I found myself getting bored halfway through, and was actually struggling to remain awake by the end.  It had a higher budget than Conan the Barbarian, but looks significantly cheaper. It’s as if they blew 75% of the budget on getting Arnold (who’s only actually in the movie for maybe five minutes before the halfway mark), and had to skimp on everything else as a result. 

Okay, they had one set that made decent use of a low budget. It's still lit terribly, though.

That presumably includes all of the non-Arnold actors, as everyone else is universally terrible.  And when Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best actor in your movie, you’ve got problems.  Brigitte Nielsen, who plays Sonja, had never acted before this, and was discovered by the producers while modeling in Italy.  She was only cast a bare eight weeks before production began, which isn’t a lot of time for an acting crash course.  She’d go on to have a respectable career as a B-movie actress, but she’s extremely wooden and stiff here.  While Nielsen was a beginner actress, Sandahl Bergman doesn’t really have an excuse.  She went from winning a Golden Globe for Best New Actress in Conan to a (deserved) Razzie Award nomination here for her turn as the evil Queen Gedren.  And child actor Ernie Reyes Jr. turns in one of the most annoying performances of the 80s as the deposed Prince Tarn. 

It’s Sir Legally-Distinct-From-Any-Previous-Character-I’ve-Played!

Speaking of the queen, let’s talk about her characterization, especially its use of a particularly annoying and noxious trope.  Namely, she’s an Evil Lesbian, and it’s implied that being a lesbian is part of what makes her evil.  She’s introduced at the beginning of the movie when she sexually assaults the young Sonja, and then orders Sonja’s gang rape and the murder of her family when Sonja resists and injures her face.  Later on, during their end-of-film confrontation, Gedren claims that the destruction of the world is of less consequence than the scar Sonja left on her cheek.  Even Sonja, for all of her badass warrior independence, has still sworn an oath to not have sex with any man that can’t beat her at combat – which leads pretty much every male with a sword in the movie to challenge her to a fight in order to get her into bed. 

So yeah, between the bad dialogue, worse acting, boring action, cheap sets and morally dubious sexual content, there’s very little to recommend this movie.  It’s definitely not one of those movies that deserves a so-bad-it’s-good watch.  However, the concept of Red Sonja itself is one that I could see working, especially in a post-Fury Road/Wonder Woman action environment.  80s remakes are en vogue right now, so how about this one?  It couldn’t be much worse.

Nostalgia: C+

Rewatch: F

Stray Thoughts:

-It’s billed as being based on a character created by Robert Howard, the writer of Conan, but that’s not really true.  It’s actually based on the Marvel Comics character (making this actually a comic book movie), who was a composite character compiled from several Howard side characters.

-Arnold himself considers this the worst movie he’s ever been in.  He’s been quoted as saying “when my kids get out of line, they're sent to their room and forced to watch Red Sonja ten times.”

-There’s one scene that I definitely don’t remember from our VHS.  At one point, Queen Gedren has her court wizard use a magic mirror to spy on Sonja, but instead the image of a naked belly dancer comes up.  It’s literally a fantasy version of the computer tech caught looking at porn during a meeting, and seems like it comes from a more modern parody film (say, Your Highness) rather than from anything in the 80s.

The Beastmaster

The movie's not this awesome

The Beastmaster (1982)

Dir. by Don Coscarelli

Starring Marc Singer, Tanya Roberts, Rip Torn and John Amos

[content warning: sexual assault, animal cruelty]

The Plot:

A prophecy states that the son of the king of the Bronze Age kingdom of Aruk will kill the evil high priest Maax (pronounced MAY-AXE).  To prevent this, the priest’s witches use magic to transport the unborn child from his mother’s womb to that of an ox, with the intent to sacrifice it at birth.  The infant is saved by a farmer from a small village, and the boy, Dar, grows up with the ability to communicate with and control animals.  When his adoptive father and the rest of his village is killed by a barbarian attack, Dar strikes out on his own, to head to Aruk and discover his destiny.

Nostalgia:

When I was a pre-teen, live-action fantasy for me consisted of three films: Willow, The Princess Bride, and The Beastmaster.  I must have seen this movie thirty times or more before I was a teenager.  I was helped by the fact that it was played on the basic cable channel TBS so often that comedians joked that TBS stood for “The Beastmaster Station.”  And come on.  What twelve-year-old WOULDN’T want a pet tiger (cat allergies nonwithstanding)?  I’ve seen this one quite a bit more than the other movies I’ve covered, enough to be able to write out a decent plot outline of the whole thing pre-rewatch.  But there’s definitely things that I didn’t recall (or were edited out of those TBS broadcasts).

The Re-Watch:

In the spring of 1982, a little movie called Conan the Barbarian came out, and was an unexpected box office smash, kicking off a brief sword-and-sorcery boom.  Don Coscarelli was busy with pre-production for what was expected to be an independently-produced fantasy movie at the time, and it was quickly snapped up by MGM and put into an accelerated production.  It managed to come out less than six months after Conan's premiere, making it the first of many Conan ripoffs out of the gate.  It’s probably the best of them, but it’s still clearly in the “Blood and Thunder” tradition of Robert E. Howard and other pulp authors.  Lord of the Rings this is not. 

The plot is definitely a disjointed mess.  After Dar is rescued from being sacrificed as a baby, there are a couple of brief scenes of him growing up and learning about his ability to communicate with animals.  Then barbarians attack, kill everyone else, and Dar decides to stop wearing shirts and start wandering around Spain...er, the ancient wilderness. At this point, the movie becomes a series of unconnected events for almost half of its run-time.  Even after Maax (whose name still sounds like a brand of laxative to me) re-enters the movie, there’s really no sense of any sort of goal for him beyond sacrificing babies and chewing scenery.  At least Rip Torn is clearly having fun as the evil priest.  Marc Singer just kind of squints his way through the movie like a low-rent Clint Eastwood, always with the same expression and tone of voice.  I will say, though, that I actually prefer Rip Torn’s performance here to James Earl Jones’s in Conan.  Thulsa Doom never really left that much of an impression with me, whereas Maax is the sort of larger-than-life villain that I associate with the pulps.

Conan + Dar = He-Man?

Also in keeping with the pulp origins of this story*, there’s a whole lot of gratuitous nudity.  I, of course, didn’t notice it during any of those pre-teen viewings, because I was watching a copy taped off the aforementioned TBS, with commercial breaks and content editing.  Viewed now, the movie almost certainly would have gotten an R if it had come out today (it’s PG, but there was no PG-13 rating at the time).  Most egregious is a scene where Dar is first introduced to his love interest for the film, a slave girl named Kiri (played by Tanya Roberts).  In a scene straight from the early 80s sex-comedy playbook, Dar spies Kiri bathing in a river, and has his ferrets steal her clothing.  When she chases after them, topless, his tiger corners her, and Dar steps in to “bravely” fight off the beast and “rescue” her.  Not content to have our hero grossly manipulate a woman during a moment of vulnerability, the script actually doubles down by having him forcibly take a kiss as “payment.”  Granted, I realize that the movie is now 35 years old, and is following a literary tradition that dates back to the much-less-enlightened 1920s and 30s.  But even Arnold’s Conan (released the same year) actually displayed some concern and affection for the women that his slave-masters forced into his cell.  This was a straight up assault, and left a bad taste in my mouth every time she displayed interest or affection for him for the remainder of the film.

On another “still very 80s” front, the movie is very very white, despite being set in an ancient culture with architecture that strongly suggests ancient Sumeria or Assur.  At least the token actor of color, John Amos, is probably the second-most-badass person in the film after the lead, and his skin color is just accepted by everyone and never remarked upon negatively.  Amos is actually really good in the role of the former captain of the guard, now a wandering protector for the disenfranchised prince of Aruk (and, unknown to him, Dar’s younger brother).  It’s a shame that his character pretty much devolves into the “listen to Dar, he knows what to do” guy by the 2/3rds mark.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time being negative about the movie, and I’d say that on the whole it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as I’d remembered it.  However, there are definitely some parts of it that I really still enjoyed.  Most notably among them is this out-of-left-field, completely incongruous horror sequence that feels like it was borrowed from Robert Howard’s colleague H. P. Lovecraft.  While wandering, Dar investigates weird lights at the top of a ridge.  He finds strange glowing pods hanging from a tree, and a man in a cage.  He frees the man, who is immediately grabbed by a strange bat-winged, no-mouthed creature, which digests him while holding him in his arms and throws out the bones onto the ground.  Dar himself is only saved by the arrival of his eagle, an animal that the bat-things worship.  No explanation for them is ever given, and I for one don’t care.  They’re the most memorable thing about the movie.

Seriously, WTF?

Also, ferrets are cute.  Especially ferrets that rescue our hero from quicksand and lead rampaging spike-studded killers on chases through evil temples (you know it’s evil because it’s got a giant Styrofoam skull blocking the exit passage).  Can we have a movie just about them?

Nostalgia: A

Re-Watch: C- 

Stray thoughts

-I ragged on the movie for its sexism and gratuitous female nudity, and it’s criticism that is well-deserved.  However, almost all of the major male characters go around bare-chested with loincloths, so it’s not like they’re fully armored and the women are from a Boris Vallejo painting.  And Marc Singer IS ripped in the movie.  There’s like a two minute sequence of him flexing and swinging his sword on a mountain-top that I distinctly remembered before my re-watch.

-The director apparently wanted to cast Demi Moore as Kiri, but the producers overruled him. 

-Some of the production design and cinematography decisions are really bizarre.  For example, Dar’s childhood village is entirely build on tall posts, with the buildings themselves suspended twenty feet in the air.  They’re not in a swamp or right next to a river or anything that I recall, so I can’t really see any reason for this.

-Dar’s tiger, Ruh, was painted black because the director had originally wanted a black leopard but couldn’t get a good camera-trained one.  I’ve read unconfirmed reports that the dye used was toxic and gave the tiger involved fatal cancer.  The animal handler was fired halfway through production, but that really doesn’t make up for it if that’s true.

-The score, especially the main theme, is actually quite good, and is way above the movie’s pay grade.  I wonder why I’ve never really heard it in fantasy score compilations or anything.

*Technically, this was based off of a 1950s Andre Norton novel, but literally the only things they kept were the concept of a man who talks to animals, and the species makeup of his animal team.  The film’s DNA very much belongs in the 1930s.