I have loved this movie since I was a little kid. I like it better than Gremlins 1. Always have. The first Gremlins is a great horror movie, if maybe just a bit too scary for little kids. Gremlins 2 is just a step-up in terms of zaniness. The series went from horror with some comedy to comedy with some horror, AKA, the Evil Dead trajectory. It works either way.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch opens with an animated Daffy Duck fighting Bugs Bunny over the opening titles. That is a clear statement of what Joe Dante wants this movie to be: a Looney Tunes cartoon. It is jokes a mile a minute. The Gremlins start their rampage early and keep going for most of the movie. If anything, there might be too much imagination in here. Gremlins 2 is entertaining you so much you're a bit exhausted afterwards. Or after an hour and forty minutes of Gremlin cackles you might have a slight headache.
All franchises must eventually Take Manhattan. Jason did it, the Muppets did it, the Daleks did it. Now the Gremlins are doing it. After his owner dies, our precious little baby Gizmo is taken over to Clamp Tower, "the largest smart building in North America". Mr. Clamp (John Glover) is parody mixture of Donald Trump and Ted Turner, but more benevolent than either of them. Where Donald Trump turned out to be a disgusting and awful human in every way who deserves nothing but the worst punishments that God could bring upon a cursed soul (please do not get well soon), Mr. Clamp is full of childlike excitement at his toys. Underneath it all he's more a Walt Disney softie, up to and including the terrible labor politics. Make John Glover president, is what I'm saying.
Clamp Tower is full of gadgets and uncaring automated voices. Gremlins 2 has like nine gags going on in the background of most scenes. It has an almost Airplane!-esque density of humor. There's a running gag that the revolving doors do not work. When you pull the fire alarm the alarm system reads out "Fire: the untamed element, oldest of Man's mysteries, giver of warmth, destroyer of forests! Right now this building is on fire!".
As you might expect, Gizmo gets wet and out come a new batch of Gremlins to attack the Clamp building. There, that's your plot.
Gremlins 2 has so much going on at all times that it would really be impossible to go over every great scene. Leonard Maltin gets murdered while reviewing the first movie. Hulk Hogan shows up to rescue the forth wall at one point. The Gremlins break into Christopher Lee's mad science lab to splices themselves into all kinds of hybrids. So you have electric Gremlins, fruit Gremlins, and pretentious evening talk show Gremlins. There's so much going on that our heroes, Billy (Zach Galligan) and Kate (Phoebe Cates) largely disappear from the movie. Phoebe Cates is missing for like a whole half hour without much explanation. In Gremlins 2 the humans take a back seat. The real stars are the Gremlins.
As a horror movie, Gremlins 2 is maybe not the scariest thing on Earth. But the effects are great. All this puppetry holds up thirty years later. The stop-motion looks a bit off, but there is not much of it. There's some really solid melt effects on the Gremlins. I'm especially impressed by the close-ups we get on the baby Gremlins growing out of the tumors on the Gremlins' back. Yuck. And yeah, some scenes like the big Spider Gremlin and the Gremlins in the elevator are kinda creepy. The Gremlin that Robert Picardo fucks at the end is creepy as well... in a different way. (Yes, he definitely fucks that Lady Gremlin.)
Oh, Gizmo is absolutely the cutest fucking thing to ever walk in celluloid. He was the Baby Yoda of his day. They're both puppets, CG just wouldn't be as adorable. I feel my biological clock tick every time he says or does anything.
Gremlins 2 gets a huge recommendation to me. Absolute must-watch. There's so much in this movie I didn't even get to the Canadian restaurant yet. Or how America's Sweetheart, Dick Miller gets to fight a gargoyle. You cannot really get more movie in a movie than you do with Gremlins 2.
Next time: One Cut of the Dead (2017), a low-budget Japanese zombie movie with a 37-minute long-take shot. I'm curious.
No comments:
Post a Comment