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
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