Gremlins

#6 in my ranking of Joe Dante’s filmography.

Joe Dante was moving up in the world. He’d met some good success with The Howling, caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, and got the assignment to bring the script by Chris Columbus script about mysterious little anarchic creatures at Christmas. He ended up creating one of those Spielberg-tinged films that helped to define a certain feel of 80s family films that had a slightly more dangerous hint to them while also embracing a certain Frank Capra-esque feel of neighborhoods. I wasn’t of the generation that really absorbed it through childhood, not seeing it for the first time until I was well into my twenties, but I can easily see how it would affect those who grew up with it more fully than it hit me.

In Chinatown, Randal Peltzer (Hoyt Axton), a hapless inventor, finds a strange creature not quite for sale in a little shop and ends up buying it from the owner’s grandson, taking it home as a present for his son Billy (Zach Galligan). With his father being unable to sell any of his inventions and his mother remaining a housewife, the household is reliant on Billy’s job as a clerk as a bank in the little town of Kingston Falls. He’s smitten with his coworker Kate (Phoebe Cates) who also works at nights at the local bar, and he’s at the mercy of Gerald (Judge Reinhold) at the bank as well as the wealthiest woman in town, Ruby Deagle (Polly Holliday), who is a mix between the Wicked Witch of the West and Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life (a film we see on screen more than once).

Things go wrong, of course, when Randal gives Billy the creature named Gizmo, and he starts breaking the three rules. He can keep Gizmo out of the sunlight pretty easily, but his young friend Pete (Corey Feldman) accidentally gets Gizmo wet, spawning five more little Mogwai. Billy takes one to the high school science teacher Mr. Hanson (Glynn Turman) who takes a blood sample for…reasons. But this all leads to both sets of Mogwai to getting their handlers to break the third rule, not to feed them after midnight, turning them from Mogwai to the titular gremlins.

This is where the heart of the film is: Dante’s combination of his love of 50s science fiction schlock with fun toys on screen with the Gremlins causing havoc wherever they go, first in the Peltzer kitchen where Randal’s gadgets fill the place, giving the perfect place for Lynn (Frances Lee McCain), Billy’s mom, putting one of them in a blender to wonderfully gruesome effect.

The final half of the movie is just an escalating series of chaos as the Gremlins get beaten back, come back in heavily increased numbers, and just run amok all over Kingston Falls. The centerpiece really is the scene in the bar, a technical display of different puppets doing a wide assortment of Looney Tunes-inspired antics that really just gets lost in the puppetry and gags but is the most entertaining the movie gets.

That’s because the actual story is perfectly competently assembled by Columbus in the script and presented by Dante, but it’s never really more than competent. It doesn’t help that little subplots just kind of disappear like Judge Reinhold’s character just not appearing in the film after about the third way mark even though he was obviously built to pay off with some kind of comeuppance in the final act. Billy doesn’t really have much of an arc, which isn’t a requirement in fiction (look at Marty McFly in Back to the Future), but he also doesn’t have much of a goal other than survive the crazy night. Heck, it’s not even really a goal to go out with Kate. He convinces her to go on a date with him before the chaos erupts. At least the chaos includes a fun ending for Mrs. Deagle, though.

What drives the film is the technical side of things and the comedy, mostly stemming from the work of Dick Miller as a down and out schlub with Dante giving him room to just be himself.

It all balances out to an entertaining little film somewhat in the style of Spielberg but undoubtedly Dante’s with Dante wearing his influences on his sleeve. It’s one of the things I like most about his movies, manifesting in this with the playing of It’s a Wonderful Life to the presence of the Looney Tunes stuffed animals in the store late, Dante isn’t afraid of paying explicit tribute to the movies and short films that he loved. It gives his films a young kid kind of energy that makes them surprisingly infectious, even if the actual narratives end up somewhat lackluster.

Gremlins is a fun little 80s timepiece, Joe Dante’s first effort to prove himself on a decently large scale, evidence that Spielberg had an eye for young talent, and an entertaining technical achievement. It really could have used another draft to both cut out some early stuff that got left on the cutting room floor in the edit and to give Billy something more of a specific goal to achieve through the chaos. Either that, or just lean far more into the chaos. Maybe the sequel will choose one of those two directions.

Rating: 3/4