[4.7/10] Different movies can offer different things, and that’s okay. Movies focused on visuals or pure plot machinery, aren’t my cup of tea, but I’ve come to appreciate them for what they are, or at least accept that they can be great, even if their particular brand of greatness doesn't really resonate with me.
But *Gremlins* is not great. *Gremlins* is a creature feature, and those films can be exciting, entertaining, and even transcendent. But *Gremlins* isn’t any of those things; it’s an excuse for the filmmakers to go wild with puppets and animatronics for two hours with the faintest spackling of story and character and, you know, movie build around that to justify their budgets.
Sure, the film has the barest excuse for theme and symbolism in it. There’s a xenophobic trend here, where the “hot new thing” is delivered from a thin Asian stereotype, and Americans fear, ignore, or mistreat it until it wreaks untold havoc. Meanwhile, the American inventor can’t create something that actually works, and the underemployed local is railing against foreign-made products. There’s problems with that point of view to begin with, but even setting them aside, *Gremlins* only applies the thinnest layer of paint from those ideas to half-justify its extended puppet party as some high-minded social commentary.
And the puppet party isn’t bad in small doses. Gizmo, the original furry gremlin or “mogwai”, is manipulatively adorable in that ugly cute sort of way. He’s got big eyes, he makes baby cooing noises, and he sings, cowers, and saves the day in a toy race car. Every time Gizmo’s on screen, I’m torn between being utterly charmed by the little furball and all too aware of how committee-designed he is to win hearts and sell toys.
The evil Gremlins aren’t bad either. The film’s effects team leans hard into the gross and grotesque, and it’s impressive, if not always particularly compelling. When a gremlin’s back starts to pulsate as its about to spawn, or the evil critters emerge from their pupal stage, or a villainous evil Gremlin slowly turns to goop when exposed to light, you can’t help but be impressed by the craftsmanship, even if it’s easy to be repulsed by the imagery. But that’s all *Gremlins* really has to offer -- a feature-length collection of creature effects that display some creativity and commitment to the bizarre, both of which are welcome in a X-mas movie, but without anything to make you care about what’s happening beyond the quality of the effects themselves. That’s the sort of tack that leads to diminishing returns decades later when technology inevitably makes your achievements seem like old hat.
That’s especially true when your film has no real characters to speak of. I defy you to tell me anything about Billy, the nominal protagonist of *Gremlins* beyond the fact that he likes his dog, his Gremlin, and Kate. He is the blandest, most flavorless main character I’ve watched in a while, with essentially zero distinctive characteristics, let alone any kind of arc. Some of the other characters have one-line description personalities, but that’s just enough to make them mildly-recognizable Gremlin fodder, with no depth whatsoever.
That’s a hobbling, if not necessarily fatal flaw, except that the film barely has a plot either. I don’t think it’s being unfair or overly reductive to sum up the film as “Boy gets Gremlin. Gremlins wreak havoc for a while. Boy defeats Gremlins.” The plot is aided ever so slightly by the three, somewhat nonsensical rules for mogwai-raising -- no light, no water, and no food after midnight -- but even then, stuff just kind of happens in *Gremlins*. Nobody in the movie really wants anything, and if they do, it’s barely, if at all, impacted by the events of the movie.
Instead, the movie just wants to screw around and have fun with a bunch of grotesque critters. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but you can’t help the feeling that director Joe Dante might have done better if he’d made a series of shorts or bumpers featuring random amusing Gremlin antics, rather than trying to string all of this together into some kind of coherent story. There’s dark, absurd humor in the Gremlins as rowdy bar patrons or Disney sing-a-long moviegoers, but these sequences go on and on to the point of exhaustion.
Worse yet, they all but ruin the movie’s mild attempts to have the audience take it, its characters, and its threats seriously. There’s nothing wrong with a Looney Tunes-style approach, but the audience isn’t expected to actually fear for the lives of Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd while they’re engaging in comic lunacy. *Gremlins* seems to want you to worry for Billy and Kate and their allies, in between its slapstick deaths and creature laugh-a-thons. It offers a laughably bad backstory monologue on why Kate hates X-mas that adds nothing to her character and the movie, and puts her and Billy in nominally mortal danger several times, but there’s no intrigue or stakes because *Gremlins* can’t decide whether it wants to be a horror film or a Tex Avery cartoon.
If all you’re asking from a creature feature is to see some well-designed puppets do some cute, wild, or wacky things that puppets don’t normally do, then *Gremlins* has you covered. In isolation, the big setpieces in the film are contrived, but technically ambitious and full of animatronic insanity. Critters swing from the ceiling, try to commit robberies, and chirp along to *Snow White and the Seven Dwarves* in a way that could be entertaining in three-to-five minute chunks.
But tasked with building that up into an actual movie, one that gives you a reason to care about the Gremlins’ antics, to fear the threat that they pose, to appreciate Billy or Kate or Gizmo for reasons beyond the little guy’s laboratory-perfected cuteness, Joe Dante and company fail miserably. Stretched out to two hours, with the necessary-but-perfunctory attempts at story and character that films call for, *Gremlins* reveals itself as nothing more than a creature effects showcase in cinematic clothing that, like its title character, should have been left in the shop.
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