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.

Ladyhawke

Ladyhawke (1985)

Dir. by Richard Donner

Starring Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer

Plot:

A fast-talking thief escapes from a medieval French dungeon, only to be waylaid by a swordsman who wants his help to break back in.  Over the course of their travel, the thief learns of the curse affecting the swordsman and his lover: he turns into a wolf at night, and she turns into a hawk by day.

Nostalgia:

This is another 80s fantasy film that I grew up with, that I haven’t seen in ages now.  I remember watching it a lot on VHS, though we never got the DVD for it, and I probably haven’t seen it since the late 90s.  I do remember watching it once in high school, specifically because I watched it in a double feature with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it was my first time seeing the latter.

Review:

In the wake of the success of the Lord of the Rings films, Hollywood’s fantasy output seemed to narrow down to two subgenres: world-shaking epic fantasy blockbusters, or YA adaptations with young protagonists.  Sometimes the two would cross with each other, resulting in things like Eragon.  In most cases, these were big-budget potential franchise starters, with copious CG and action writ large.

However, Hollywood used to produce a much different sort of fantasy film.  Prior to the 90s CG revolution, which helped to make secondary-world fantasy like LotR more feasible, a good portion of the fantasy movies made were essentially medieval dramas with a couple of wizards or dragons thrown in.  Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster, for all of their Bronze Age grandeur, are essentially the story of one man using his sword to survive, and accidentally falling into some semblance of a quest in the second half of the film.  Even in The Princess Bride the stakes are personal ones: Buttercup’s life, and Inigo’s revenge.  No giant clash of armies, no apocalypse to avert, no evil warlock with plans for world domination.

Ladyhawke is very much a part of this tradition, and possibly one of its finest examples.  It’s essentially a cursed love triangle, played out on the backdrop of 13^th century France.  Other than some nameless henchmen, there are only seven significant speaking roles in the whole movie, and most of it is shot outdoors on location, with the occasional ruin or inn thrown in.  It’s a very small, intimate film, almost entirely unlike modern fantasy.  In fact, the “fantasy” aspects of the movie are extremely limited, being mainly restricted to the titular curse and a fortuitously timed eclipse at the climax.  If it took place in a modern setting, I’d say it was more magical realism than fantasy.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that the movie isn’t any good in comparison to modern fantasy.  In fact, I enjoyed it quite a lot.  Matthew Broderick in particular was quite amusing, as the escaped thief who keeps up a running dialogue with God about his attempts to reform and the mixed messages that fate is sending him.  It’s not quite the fourth-wall breaking that occurs in Ferris Bueller, but it provides some levity in an otherwise heavy story.  I also enjoyed Rutger Hauer as the taciturn Navarre, single-mindedly fixated on killing the bishop that cursed him even when a way to break the curse is presented to him.  I’m pretty sure he couldn’t actually throw his zweihander like a javelin, however, something he does more than once.

That...is not how you use a two-handed sword

While I’d say that most of the film holds up quite well (and Broderick’s more modern-sounding character is actually ahead of his time), there’s definitely one aspect that immediately dates it, and rather badly at that: the score.  Written in part by Alan Parsons, it’s one of the most 80s-taculur pieces of synthesizer prog rock I’ve ever heard.  The main theme sounds like the intro to an NES Mega Man game.  There’s some token cues with more traditional orchestral score, but these are few and far between.  Broderick’s dialogue didn’t manage to take me out of the movie, but the music almost did.

My other major complaint is that this is a movie whose plot hinges around two characters who transform into animals daily, and yet there’s no actual transformation sequence in the movie.  It always happens offscreen, the closest we get being some blown-out closeups of Michelle Pfeiffer’s face with some fluttering wings superimposed over top.  Since this is the central magical conceit of the film, it's definitely a major missed opportunity.  Come on, Donner!  Your budget was higher than either American Werewolf in London OR The Thing.  You’ve gotta give us something!

Ahem…Anyway, I think that for the most part the movie’s still an enjoyable watch.  A little dated in some ways, a lot dated in others, but overall I’m positive on it.  I still prefer Willow, but it’s definitely better quality than some of the other fantasy films I’ve watched for his project (I’m looking at you, Krull).

Nostalgia: B-

Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-This is one of the only movies I can think of where Rutger Hauer doesn’t play a villain.  He does bring some of those sinister overtones to Navarre, though, especially in the early going before you learn about the curse.

-You know, the movie spends over a third of its running time before you find out about the curse.  Maybe they shouldn’t have put the reveal in the title.

Willow

 

Willow (1988)

Dir. by Ron Howard

Starring Warwick Davis, Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley and Jean Marsh

[content warning: body horror, brief discussion of romantic consent issues]

Synopsis:

Willow is a farmer and amateur stage magician from a small village of hobbit-like Nelwyn.  One day, his children find a human baby in the river.  When soldiers attack the village looking for the baby, Willow must leave on a journey to protect the infant – who has been prophesized to bring about the destruction of the evil sorceress terrorizing the human nations.  Along the way, he picks up allies in the form of a human knight-turned-thief, two mischievous brownies, and a sorceress trapped in the body of a possum*.

Nostalgia:

I don’t remember seeing this movie in theaters, but I know that my parents took me to see it.  I do distinctly remember the cardboard box to the Wendy’s kid’s meal promoting the movie, since it had magic tricks printed on it, and it came with a plastic reproduction of Willow’s log trick.  It’s almost certainly the first live-action fantasy movie I ever saw in theaters.  It’s still one of my favorites, even if it’s been left behind by the post-LotR/Harry Potter fantasy movie renaissance.

Review:

If you’d asked me what my favorite fantasy movie was my freshman year of college, Willow probably would have been my answer.  While The Princess Bride definitely falls into the fantasy genre, in my mind I’ve always associated it more with Robin Hood and other swashbucklers instead of more “traditional” fantasy.  Of course, my sophomore year Fellowship of the Ring would come out and blow that all away, but for a time in the 1990s Willow was definitely top-tier fantasy filmmaking.

While the aforementioned LotR films have surpassed this movie in pretty much every category, it’s still not without its charms.  Willow, at first blush, shares a lot of similarity with other fantasy movies of the 1980s, such as Dragonslayer, Legend and the Conan films (though without the latter films’ heavy bloodshed and nudity).  It consists of a lot of stock fantasy conventions (wicked queens, prophecies, faeries, D&D-style taverns, etc.), and the Nelwyn village entirely populated by short human-like people immediately conjures Tolkien comparisons.  So far, so derivative.  However, in my opinion Willow manages to transcend its origins and become something enjoyable, and even memorable at times.

One of the best things this movie has going for it is its casting, especially its lead.  Warwick Davis is probably best known today for playing Professor Flitwick in the Harry Potter movies.  However, his first role came at the age of twelve, when he was cast as one of the background Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.  Kenny Baker (R2-D2) was originally slated to play the lead Ewok character of Wicket, but he got sick and Davis found himself promoted into the role.  George Lucas was so impressed by him that he promised to come up with a movie specifically for him to play the lead.  Five years later, Willow became his first starring role, and his first movie out of a creature costume.  Despite only being seventeen when it was filmed, Davis is able to carry the entire movie, showing why he would become the most prominent short actor of the late 20th century (and probably the 2000s up until Game of Thrones thrust Peter Dinklage into the spotlight).  Val Kilmer, as the cocky swordsman Madmartigan, delivers my favorite performance of his career, and Joanne Whalley is badass as the armor-clad daughter of the evil queen (a character who is never once challenged for being a female warrior, something that is unfortunately still all too rare).

Another notable thing about the movie are the effects, which had a major part in film history.  This movie finds Hollywood at a crossroads, effect-wise.  It had been four years since The Last Starfighter became the first movie with all-digital effects, and ILM itself had already used CG in Young Sherlock Holmes and two Star Trek movies.  However, this movie, and one scene in particular, was a critical breakthrough for CG.  Near the end of the film, Willow must use a wand given to him by the queen of the faeries to free the good sorceress Fin Raziel from the animal form that she has been trapped in.  In a single sustained shot, she transforms from a goat to an ostrich, a peacock, a tortoise and a tiger, before finally becoming human again.  To achieve this, ILM decided to eschew the usual Hollywood techniques of stop-motion or lap dissolves from one shot to another, Wolfman-style, and instead went with an untested computer method.  In doing so, they pretty much invented digital morphing from scratch, paving the way for the T-1000, Odo, and hundreds of other CG characters.

Of course, singling out this one 20 second scene isn’t to say that the rest of the effects are bad, per se.  Okay, sure, they’re pretty crummy by modern standards.  The blue screen matting is extremely obvious, and at least one major action sequence, involving a fight against a two-headed dragon-like creature, is clearly against a stop-motion puppet, albeit one with a Star Wars-worthy design.  But they were of at least average quality for the late 80s, and I for one kind of enjoy them that way.  A lot of the stuntwork is also superb, especially in a wild downhill slide down a snow-covered mountain that ends in the only time I’ve ever seen a Warner Bros. cartoon-style “person rolling in snow becomes a giant snowball” gag pulled off effectively in live-action.  And I can’t go without mentioning the other transformation sequence.  Immediately prior to the CG transformation discussed earlier is one of the most impressive practical effect transformation sequences ever committed to film, in which the evil queen transforms an entire army into pigs. I'm surprised it didn't get a Best Makeup Oscar nomination, considering the category was actually created in the first place to honor movies like An American Werewolf in London.

Is Willow a perfect film?  Of course not.  Aside from the aforementioned blue-screen failures, the movie is also very white (though I did appreciate the fact that the most skilled Nelwyn warrior in the village was a PoC more this time than any prior viewing), and it’s got a romantic subplot with some major consent issues (basically, Madmartigan gets love-potioned, and is very aggressive in his unwanted advances towards someone he’d previously hated.  The two continue to show interest in each other once it wears off, and eventually become a couple by movie’s end).  But it’s also got significant anti-bigotry themes, and it passes the Bechdel test in the first thirty seconds.  Willow is a film that’s been consigned to minor cult status in the wake of the 2000s fantasy film boom, and I think it could definitely stand to be rediscovered somewhat.

Nostalgia: A

Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-The leader of Queen Bavmorda’s armies, General Kael, is actually named after film critic Pauline Kael, a fact that didn’t escape her notice when she reviewed the movie.  The two-headed dragon was also named for Siskel & Ebert.

-Airk, Madmartigan’s friend who leads the good guy army, wields an unusual sword that’s actually a long blade attached to an enclosed gauntlet.  It’s a real weapon, called a pata, and is originally from India.  They were actually typically used either in a pair or with a shield, so it’s interesting that when Madmartigan tries to use it on its own to defeat Kael, he gets his ass kicked until he picks up another sword and starts dual-wielding. 

*In before anyone else says anything.  That’s “possum” as in the Australian marsupial, not the American playing-dead possum.  A lot of the exteriors were filmed in New Zealand.