Gremlins 2: The New Batch

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

Gremlins, but bigger is not something I object to. That combination is a recipe for increased anarchy which, when it works, is something I really enjoy, and I really enjoy it here in Joe Dante’s return to the unruly franchise that’s too irreverent, manic, and, well, anarchic for actual franchise material. However, it also carries over the same little niggling issues I had with the first film, especially around the main character not really having a goal beyond the most basic of plot mechanics to work through, making me think that Spielberg should have handed the first film over to Bobs Zemeckis and Gale rather than Joe Dante. And yet, the special blend of anarchy that Dante and writer Charles S. Haas bring to the sequel is some kind of unique and entertaining that even the Two Bobs at their height wouldn’t have been able to quite find.

Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) and Kate (Phoebe Cates) have moved to New York City to find work in Clamp Tower, owned by Daniel Clamp (John Glover). Billy is in the art department, working on Clamp’s vision of a revamped Chinatown under the auspices of Marla (Haviland Morris), while Kate gives tours with a silly hat of the tower on her head. All activity is observed by Forster (Robert Picardo). When the old man who runs the curiosity shop, the last holdout from buyouts preventing Clamp’s work, dies, little Gizmo, the mogwai from the first film, escapes and gets immediately captured by a scientist working for Dr. Catheter (Christopher Lee) who has an office in Clamp Tower, and we can see how this chaos is going to erupt.

The first thirty minutes or so of the film is about setting up all the main and secondary personalities of the film that will get payoffs later, and the film’s saving grace outside of its gremlins action is that it has a clear-eyed sense of setup and payoff mechanics regarding its characters, in particular the side-characters. Special mention has to be made of Grandpa Fred (Robert Prosky), a late night horror movie host on one of Clamp’s many channels who dreams of being a newscaster who gets his chance when the outside media is cut off from the action within Clamp Tower, leaving Fred as the only source of news from the inside. It’s super basic stuff, but that it’s applied to half a dozen little character stories helps make the action outside of the gremlin anarchy work better than in the first film where a good chunk of the side characters simply disappeared while others were just around until gremlins showed up.

And the gremlins and mogwai really are the main stars here. From the puppet work to the actual sequences dominated by the puppets, these creature effects are leaps and bounds above what we saw in the film from five years previous. That’s not to deride the effects on the first, just that Dante had more money to make this film from Warner Bros. than he had previous been able to get his hands on, and he threw it all into production design and creature effects, and it shows. The mogwai that form from Gizmo getting wet are more individualized and can do more. The very large host of gremlins are amazingly unique (from bats to spiders to a girl version to an electricity version to…that Key and Peele sketch was spot on), and there’s such a great variety of things that they do.

It really is the anarchic spirit of Looney Tunes brought to live-action life, and it is infectious as it plays out.

Unfortunately, I really think that Billy and Kate, as our main characters, are drags on the film. They work to get the gremlins destroyed by the end, but they don’t really want much. In terms of payoffs, they have some of the least effective, and I just don’t find their little dramas about Billy and Marla having a work date that Kate gets kind of mad about to be particularly interesting or entertaining. This creates a certain narrative looseness that the anarchy of the gremlins on the loose in the office building inelegantly fills, making me wish that it was just the rest of the little subplots without Billy and Kate. It actually might have been more cohesive that way.

So, I see the sequel as a step up from the first with the increased embrace of the chaos and anarchy of the gremlins, using the increased budget to great effect, but ultimately it’s only paying lip service to the forms of narrative storytelling in ways that make the overall package less entertaining than it could have been. I essentially wanted this to be Joe Dante’s masterpiece, but it ends up being an entertaining but mild enhancement over the original.

It’s fun.

Rating: 3/4