Gremlins

Joe Dante, 1984
Rotten Tomatoes score: 84%

While we're on the subject of scary Christmas movies, here's a favorite of every kid I went to school with. I, for one, never saw it until a week ago.

When it comes to movies that everyone but me saw and loved as a kid, I'm always wary of a Christmas Vacation situation, where I am the only person alive who doesn't get what the fuss is all about. But this time, I do get it. I am a little nonplussed by the overwhelmingly positive critical reaction, but I have no trouble seeing why my elementary school peers were obsessed with Gremlins.

Actually, this is the rare case of a Hollywood blockbuster that the critics liked better than the viewers. The audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is only 77%.

Like Batman Returns, this movie was well-received but criticized for being too scary for children. In fact, it's often cited (along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) as the MPAA's impetus for creating the PG-13 rating category. It's fairly mind-boggling that this film was rated PG, since that rating is now reserved for the kiddiest of kiddie movies, but in the early 80s, that was not the case.

What's strange, though, is that the movie starts out in clear PG territory, only to verge closer and closer to R-rated horror as it goes on. It's as if the movie was cobbled together out of a PG script and an R script, and the final product ended up with bits and pieces of each. In fact, I'm prepared to offer that as a serious hypothesis.

Think about it. The main characters, Billy and Kate, look and act like teenagers, but for some reason they're supposed to be adults. Billy lives with his parents, has a rambunctious pet dog that follows him around, butts heads with the curmudgeonly lady down the street, goes to a high school science teacher for advice, and has a teenage crush on Kate. He's even best buds with Corey Feldman. If it weren't for the handful of scenes where you see him working as a bank teller, I would have no doubt that he's supposed to be sixteen. Kate, for her part, works a part-time job at a local bar and grill after school—sorry, I mean after work.

Billy's dad Rand, too, is right out of an 80s kids' movie, what with his wacky inventions and his hapless sales pitches. He blunders into a shop in Chinatown that seems to have been relocated out of a bad western, where the cartoon-character owner sells him a mysterious but adorable creature called a mogwai. The owner's son gives Rand three important warnings: never expose the mogwai to sunlight, never let him get wet, and never feed him after midnight.

As Billy discovers, there are very good reasons for these rules. Sunlight is deadly to the mogwai, water causes him to reproduce by budding, and if he eats after midnight, he transforms into a hideous animatronic creature. Actually, Billy's pet Gizmo never makes the transformation himself—he did in an early draft screenplay—but several dozen of his water-generated duplicates do.

At the same time, the movie transforms from a wacky kiddie film to a gory monster movie. Probably the most memorable scene in the whole picture is where Billy's mom is ambushed by the gremlins at home and has to do battle with them using household appliances. She kills one gremlin in a blender and another in the microwave, and the effects are realistic and moderately disgusting. If I were watching this movie in 1984 with my six-year-old Care-Bear-loving kids, I would probably have started getting nervous after that microwave scene.

The movie is not all that graphic, really, and it gets away with as much as it does because the violence is all committed against puppets rather than people. The gremlins do kill a few humans, but always bloodlessly and off-camera. Actually, I remember one on-screen human death, and it was the only scene in the movie that made me laugh out loud. I know that's a horrible thing to say, but just look at it:

The problem is, once you realize you're watching a movie where it's okay to laugh at an old lady flying through the window on a stair lift, you know you're not watching a movie where you can possibly care about any of the characters. And that's my biggest complaint about Gremlins. I'm not opposed to gallows humor, but it definitely clashes with the lighthearted, corny family film we began with. Maybe that was the point, but I liked it better the way it started. (Remember, I'm the guy who said Bushwhacked was underrated.)

Where was the scene where Billy's scientist pal makes the discovery that helps defeat the gremlins? Or where dad's zany inventions save the day? Why wasn't Corey Feldman involved in the final showdown? Why put Corey Feldman in a movie just to have him sit in a bedroom window doing nothing? (Was Corey Feldman famous in 1984?)

And what was the point of having a crusty World War II veteran neighbor who has a preexisting fear of gremlins? He should have been involved in the finale too, but instead, he was the very first gremlin casualty. Why bother with this character if you're not going to give him so much as an "I told you so" scene? And speaking of World War II gremlins, I think these monsters should have confined themselves entirely to technology-related murders. Gremlins aren't supposed to just maul people to death.

Most baffling of all is the scene where Phoebe Cates relates the story of her father's gruesome death. It's neither scary nor funny—it's just sad—and it has absolutely nothing to do with any other event in the plot. What was the purpose of that? Apparently, Steven Spielberg hated the scene but wasn't willing to pull rank and have it cut.

But enough of these gripes. It's a good movie. It didn't quite know what it wanted to be, but it did a good job of whatever it was doing.

Most of all, Gremlins gave me a sense of nostalgia, even though I never saw it in its own day. It's charmingly unassuming. There is no big picture, no sense of self-importance. It's just a silly movie for the sake of being a silly movie. If they made it today, it would be two and a half hours long and miserably bogged down with teasers for the 75-film Gremlins® Cinematic™ Universe™. Based on the critics' reviews alone, I'd have to say this was overrated, but taking the audience rating into account, I'll settle on

Batman Returns

Tim Burton, 1989
Rotten Tomatoes score: 80%

When I reviewed The Nightmare Before Christmas, I mentioned that Tim Burton had directed two other scary Christmas movies in the 1990s. This is one of them. (The other one is Edward Scissorhands. I wasn't trying to keep anybody in suspense.)

This is also one of those movies where I have no idea why it takes place at Christmas. It was released in June, and the fact that it's Christmas has nothing in particular to do with the plot. And supposedly it was very hot during production, so they had to have huge refrigerated trailers to keep the penguins safe.

Batman Returns, of course, is a sequel to 1989's Batman. But there's very little in terms of continuity. We have a new villain, a new love interest for Bruce Wayne, a new mayor of Gotham City, and even the city itself looks totally different. Apparently, an early script would have brought back Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, whose absence is unexplained and disappointing. (I think they even wanted to set up Two-Face, which would have been a little much in this already complicated plot.) The same script also would have contained Robin, and I'm glad they thought better of that idea.

Instead of Two-Face, the ringleader of this jolly Yuletide adventure is Christopher Walken as Max Shreck (named after a famous silent film actor, not to be confused with the famous green ogre), a crooked industrialist who plots to install a puppet mayor to facilitate his fraudulent schemes. If I were writing such a story, I might make Shreck a securities fraudster, or maybe a price fixer—after all, the nature of his crime is irrelevant, since the story is really about the cover-up plot—but they went in a different direction. It turns out Shreck has built a power plant that secretly siphons electricity off the grid instead of generating it. I guess you just put it in reverse.

Evidence of Shreck's malfeasance is uncovered by the Penguin, a mysterious sewer-dweller who for some reason is also the boss of a crime syndicate called the Red Triangle Gang. Shreck and the Penguin reach a mutually agreeable solution whereby Shreck will help the Penguin transform from a shadowy weirdo into a mayoral candidate, and the Penguin, once elected, will be Shreck's loyal ally.

Meanwhile, Shreck's nervous, bashful executive secretary Selina Kyle has also learned about the power plant caper, so Shreck throws her out a high-rise window to her expected demise. Unbeknown to Shreck, Selina crashes through a series of conveniently situated awnings and survives the fall. While she lies stunned on the pavement, a swarm of cats gather around her and chew on her fingers. I have no idea what this is about, but it's the most disturbing cat-related scene I've ever witnessed, with the possible exception of this:

Apparently the finger-chewing gives Selina a new lease on life, and she emerges from the ordeal a fearless thrill-seeker. She miraculously transforms a vinyl jacket into enough yardage to form a full-body cat suit and embarks on an ill-defined quest for revenge against Shreck.

All of this mayhem inevitably catches the attention of Batman, who gets around to making a cameo appearance in his own movie so he can use wildly excessive force to defeat the Red Triangle Gang. He suspects that the Penguin and Shreck are behind the gang, but the rest of the city sympathizes with the Penguin, especially after he reveals that his wealthy parents cast him out upon the waters in a basket like Moses, and he was raised by penguins. (Why is there a flock of Penguins inhabiting Gotham City's cavernous, seemingly non-functional sewers?)

The plot goes on and on. Catwoman and the Penguin team up to defeat Batman, while Bruce Wayne simultaneously falls in love with Selina Kyle; the Penguin frames Batman for the murder of a beauty queen; Batman exposes the Penguin's criminal connections in time to spoil the election; the Penguin tries to take revenge by killing all the first-born children of Gotham—remember when they made kids' toys and McDonald's happy meal tie-ins to promote this movie?

Then there's an ending where Batman kills the Penguin and Catwoman kills Shreck, and then you think Catwoman's dead, and then there's a shot where you see that she's still alive. And then she didn't come back in any of the sequels, so I guess she's dead after all.

---

This movie was (justifiably) criticized for being too dark and frightening, but I've always liked that about it. That, of course, makes it even more bizarre that it takes place at Christmastime, but I think bizarre was the name of the game here. According to the making-of DVD features, Tim Burton was reluctant to make a Batman sequel until they gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted with it. He certainly exercised that prerogative—if it had been twenty years later, he would have cast Johnny Depp as Batman and Helena Bonham-Carter as Commissioner Gordon.

Longtime Batman fans were uncomfortable with some of the ways the movie deviates from the comics. They made the Penguin much scarier-looking and more psychopathic, but I don't begrudge them that artistic license. More controversial was the movie Batman's propensity for killing crooks. For some reason, that criticism is usually leveled at Batman Returns in particular, even though he was equally homicidal in the 1989 film.

The writers justified their scripts by saying that 1990s audiences would not accept a hero who ties criminals up and drops them off at city hall. Maybe not, but the Dark Knight series proved that a marginally kinder and gentler Caped Crusader is still accessible to today's jaded viewers. The pendulum seems to have swung the other way lately, as Ben Affleck's bloodthirsty, scruffy-looking, patently unhinged portrayal makes Michael Keaton's version look downright cuddly.

Tim Burton also argued that his darker and edgier Batman harked back to the early comic books of the 1930s, and I can't argue with that:

I have to admit, it's hard enough to root for a hero who dresses like a bat and beats up criminals in the middle of the night, and it doesn't make it any easier when he goes around setting clown-people on fire. Or shooting bad guys in their sleep.

Anyway, there's plenty to like in Batman Returns, from Danny Elfman's haunting music score, to Michelle Pfeiffer decapitating mannequins with a whip, to Pee-Wee Herman as the Penguin's father, to Danny DeVito biting a man's nose and eating an actual raw fish, for real, on camera.

What an iconic holiday image.

Well, I can't say this movie is underrated, because it was quite well-received in spite of its reputation for giving people nightmares. It's good, but

A Bad Moms Christmas

Jon Lucas, Scott Moore, 2017
Rotten Tomatoes score: 27%

I blame Billy Bob Thornton, really. Ever since he starred in Bad Santa, we've been treated to a litany of movie titles beginning with the word "bad". You've got your Bad Teacher, your Bad Grandpa, your Bad News Bears... Oh, sorry, that was a critically-acclaimed Walter Matthau movie from 1976.

Anyway, there was also Bad Moms, the sleeper hit of 2016 that spawned this sequel.

Somehow it seems the word "bad" has been watered down quite a bit in the process. Bad Santa was a truly bad person—a criminal, even—and the story he inhabited was unrepentantly subversive and antisocial. The great accomplishment of that movie was to present this awful person so sympathetically that his half-assed redemption actually feels uplifting. When Bad Santa says, "I beat up some kids today. It made me feel good about myself," it actually makes sense in context.

But the badness of the bad moms mostly just amounts to childishness, and it's haphazard at that. They're generally normal people, but they say cuss words and periodically indulge in a college-student-like obsession with booze and male nudity. Is this "bad" behavior? It's certainly a far cry from looting a department store on Christmas Eve and beating up children. It's the kind of thing we all kidded ourselves into believing was "wild and crazy" when we were 21, but really it was just mildly embarrassing.

---

Well, I don't often review contemporary movies, so I don't usually worry about spoilers. But in case you for whatever reason are considering seeing A Bad Moms Christmas, consider this your warning. That's assuming I can remember the plot.

The three "bad" moms—Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell), and Carla (Kathryn Hahn)—have returned for more hijinks just in time for Christmas. But this time, their own even worse moms (Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines, and Susan Sarandon) have arrived in town to make life miserable for their daughters. Amy's mom is a rich snob hell-bent on making Amy feel like a failure (but adopting a completely random scattershot approach to doing so); Kiki's mom is a dangerously psychotic lunatic who watches her daughter and son-in-law make love from the corner of their bedroom; and Carla's mom is a pitiful, drug-addled drifter who blows into town to bum a few bucks from Carla.

The bad moms try to work off some of their holiday stress by getting drunk in a mall food court in the afternoon (am I missing something, or do mall food courts not serve liquor?) and then giving a department store Santa a lap dance. The problem with this scene—apart from the fact that it isn't funny—is that it's completely out of character. Two of the three bad moms are depicted as basically normal people, but normal people don't do things like this, or even fantasize about doing things like this. The movie makes no pretense of trying to justify this mayhem in terms of plot of character. It's in the movie so it could be in the trailer.

And because the scene was fabricated to generate trailer material rather than to tell any part of a coherent story, there is no need for the other mall patrons to call security to stop the three drunken madwomen, even when they steal a Christmas tree from a Foot Locker. You might think such a senseless act would result in a visit from the police, or at least a raised eyebrow from the dads and kids back home, but no. It serves its "comedic" purpose and is forgotten. The tree itself is seen once in Amy's living room in the immediately following scene, and then never seen or mentioned again.

The conflicts between the moms and the moms' moms continue to tread water for the next hour or so. Amy's mom is dedicated to realizing her own ideal of a perfect Christmas, but she goes about it in a clumsy and inconsistently written way. In one scene, she hires a work crew to build an expensive Disney-World-style animatronic Christmas display, which Amy's children implausibly find exciting (no real kid would give a crap about it), but moments later grandma is the kids' nemesis when she drags them to a production of the original Russian version of the Nutcracker. It's as if she has no motivations of her own and exists solely to create conflict.

Luckily, Amy saves the day by skipping the ballet and taking the kids instead to Sky Zone. (For those like me who were not in the know, Sky Zone is a real-life indoor trampoline park. So the entire scene is an extended product placement, a little bit less intrusive than the Krispy Kreme plot of the Power Rangers movie or the cringe-inducing Dunkaccino commercial in Jack and Jill. Or, hey, does anybody remember Mac and Me?)

Meanwhile, Kiki and her mother go to see a psychotherapist played by Wanda Sykes. The sequence plays like a Goofus and Gallant tutorial on how not to direct a comedy scene. Every time a joke manages to hit the mark, the scene goes right back off the rails moments later. At one point, when Kiki is just about to confront her mother about her disturbing behavior, the mom abruptly announces that she has cancer. Ironically, the movie's unevenness works to its advantage here, because after a half-hour of jarring shifts in tone, we can't be sure this isn't a genuine, ineptly-written plot twist. Then, seconds later, the mom breaks the tension by specifying her condition as "stage-12 heart cancer", which clues us (and Wanda Sykes) in to the desperate manipulation the mom is engaging in.

But for some reason, Kiki, who is not otherwise depicted as stupid, still thinks her mother is telling the truth. Having missed an obvious exit strategy from a joke that really doesn't have any more to give, the screenwriters instead have Kiki's mom admit her deception, then retract the admission, then try again with several more nonexistent diseases. In fact, she spends the rest of the movie retreading this flimsy gag. And once she walks out on the therapy session (in another sloppily-timed bit), Wanda Sykes forgets she's playing a character and launches into a bizarre standup-style put-down of Kiki.

I'm sorry to belabor this one scene at such length, but it illustrates the movie's refusal to follow through with its comedic premises. There is funny stuff in there somewhere, and another rewrite or two might have resulted in a great scene. They just couldn't be bothered.

So that brings us to the final mom, Carla, and her mom, Susan Sarandon. They spend very little time together, aside from the Sky Zone scene and another bit where they steal groceries from patrons on their way out of the supermarket. At first they dust off the old routine of pretending to be charity bell-ringers, but that quickly devolves into physically removing groceries from people's carts.

I have to admit the rapidly escalating ridiculousness of this gag had promise, but once again, the lazy writing and direction get the better of it. Outrageous behavior by the main characters is not funny in and of itself; the humor comes from the way the rest of the world reacts to the outrageous behavior. Here, the victimized patrons just stand there and allow themselves to be mugged—why should they care any more than the filmmakers did?

Apart from that escapade, Carla mostly shares her screen time with Justin Hartley, playing a firefighting stripper in need of a bikini wax. (I forgot to mention that Carla is a professional bikini-waxer at a spa. In her first scene, she refuses to service a rather hirsute young lady, whom she calls "Sasquatch", and passes her over for a senior citizen, whom she calls "Betty White". And that's the scene. They must have been delighted with their day's work. "Well, we've ridiculed hairy people and old people; let's hit that catering table!") The Justin Hartley waxing scene is very, very broad and obvious, but the way the two characters treat it as if it were a conventionally romantic encounter is within arms' length of being funny. But, of course, they go nowhere with it.

There's not much else to mention. I could describe the ending, but there's not much to say except that the moms and the moms' moms make their peace. The one thing I will say is that the reconciliation scene takes place during a Christmas Eve mass, and none of the congregants seem to care that the main characters are having a full-voice conversation in the middle of the church.

In a movie about moms, one thing that seemed conspicuously missing was any interaction between the main characters and their children. I can't even remember which kids belonged to which mom, except for Carla's kid, who is so slow-witted it makes you worry about his mental well-being, but it's supposed to be funny. In addition to kids, Amy has a boyfriend—Jesse—possibly the flattest character in the movie, who is a 100% perfect guy with no flaws whose only purpose is to be the butt of Amy's mom's snobbery.

I guess Jesse's other purpose is to have a child who repeatedly says the F-word. She says it about six times, and at first the joke is that she overheard Amy saying it (in bed), and Amy is embarrassed. Then, she says it a few more times for no comedic purpose, unless you happen to think it's inherently funny when little kids say the F-word. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't offended by this gag. There just wasn't anything funny about it. (Little kids love to say the F-word. That's old news.)

And that about sums up A Bad Moms Christmas. It's not hopelessly unfunny. It's just really, really lazy. Nothing in it made me laugh, but there were a few moments that made me think to myself, "Hey, that was a joke!" Amy's mom had a few scenes that had real potential, like when she turns up the car radio to treat the children to a particularly dissonant snippet of the Russian Nutcracker, or her grudging pseudo-apology in the big reconciliation scene. I liked the decision to allow her character to stay basically unlikable at the end of the story, but I think that was more the product of aimless writing than a conscious choice.

Were they in a rush to get the movie out by Christmas? Or did they just not care? I guess I can't blame them. They couldn't possibly have believed they were making a good movie. They just figured the title alone would draw in enough people to make it financially justified, and any more than the bare minimum of effort would be a waste. I don't disagree.

---

So that concludes my thoughtful, in-depth review of this motion picture. Obviously a person of my exquisite taste and discernment can't enjoy such a commonplace film.

Now to watch Ernest Saves Christmas for the fiftieth time.