Gremlins Review

Movie: Gremlins
By: Maniac E
Date: December 20, 2013

Never feed him after midnight

Gremlins a collaboration of Joe Dante and Steven Spielberg combining their talents to bring us a holiday horror comedy. When it got released it hit the number one box office spot within the first weekend. Will this tale still be interesting now?

In the heart of Chinatown, Billy's dotty dad discovers a Mogwai (mog-why) and buys it as a Christmas present for him. Billy loves his sweet furry pet Gizmo, but disregards the basic rules of owning a Mogwai. Gizmo spawns nasty offspring, and the new creatures immediately go wild, dispatching a science teacher and tearing up the house. Billy and his mom are forced to destroy the little suckers. The mayhem looks under control until Spike, the malicious Gremlin leader, hops into the school swimming pool and multiplies exponentially. Soon the whole town is under attack. In the end, Billy and his girlfriend Kate (Phoebe Cates) blow up the town theater with the Gremlins inside. Just when the plot seems predictably laid out, the movie transforms into something else something much worse. The monsters mutate, and you just don't see the nastiness coming.

With this movie almost being 30 years old and me growing up with it, the movie still holds together. It still is a nice dark comedy movie that really for me is a every year must to watch. This year it finally became available on bluray which for me was again reason to watch it. Gizmo is still one of the cutest things that has been coming from Joe Dante, the puppets still look great and the whole movie just feels well-paced. Acting wise it was done on a smart level since almost none of the cast had any big things behind their names. And Phoebe Cates still looks like a sweetheart!

The special effects were smartly done even with a lower budget. Steven Spielberg really toke a risk with Gremlins but I guess even after 30 years it still pays off. The way that the humor is done with the evil Gremlins is just absurd and over the top, which is a good thing since it are more or less alter egos of Gizmo. They shouldn't behave well and decent, the death scenes they cause are still memorable with shooting a grandmother out of a window with her stair seat. Of course this PG13 movie can't show it all but I have the feeling PG13 thirty years ago seemed a lot more forgivable than now.

I guess most of the people younger than 25 won't get a lot of things that are going on in the movie .With all the scenes from It's a Wonderful Life and Invasion of the Body Snatchers playing on televisions around town which really felt fitting to the overall feel of Gremlins. It showed a lot of love towards cinema itself just look at the sequence in which the gremlins are mesmerized during a screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Of course Gremlins is the kind of movie every middle aged person has grown up with and with the many TV broadcasts most would even say I've seen it enough. But this bluray release just showed me how freaking nice the movie is and how awesome Gizmo still is. It even has a nice finger to point and showing us the things about greed but who really cares right? Gizmo should be getting a real good new story, and I for one will not pass on it.