Review #320: Gremlins (1984)

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #6 - Gremlins (1984)

[This movie doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere for free; it's on most platforms with a subscription, and there's a few playlists on YouTube that look like the full movie spread out over 30+ short videos, but I'm not about to test any of them to find out. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, Hulu, Roku, Philo, or Max, it should be included in your subscription.]

It's been a LONG time since I've seen this movie- maybe thirty years? Maybe longer. Gremlins is one of the films responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating (along with Poltergeist and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and I think the lack of a PG-13 rating at the time is a huge factor in why this movie so tightly straddles the line between horror and comedy. Does it succeed at both? I guess I'll get to that.

Gremlins is a story about a teen named Billy whose eccentric father buys him a mysterious pet for Christmas- a mogwai named Gizmo. Mogwai are adorable and intelligent (and clearly meant to appeal to a young demographic)- but come with three rules: sunlight kills them, water makes them multiply, and if you feed them after midnight, they turn into horrible reptilian tricksters that get dubbed "gremlins". Bing bang boom, Gizmo gets wet, his progeny get fed after midnight, then they take over the town and straight-up murder a bunch of people.

I'm really conflicted about this movie. This movie is clearly meant to be a comedy (there's tons of extremely well-done slapstick and visual gags throughout, including an entire scene that's just a bunch of gremlins in a bar doing pantomime skits for like ten minutes) and the first half of the film feels like your typical feel-good adventure film about a struggling family in a small town around Christmas. But the movie is also clearly meant to be horror, as there's some incredibly terrifying and distressing scenes in there, both involving humans who get straight-up murdered, and gremlins who get stabbed and ground up and microwaved (but they're evil monsters so like, maybe it's okay?). But at times it feels like it fights so hard to be both that it can't fully commit to either.

Allegedly, the original script had Gizmo eventually becoming a gremlin and getting killed at the end. (The one known as "Stripe", the leader of the pack, was originally intended to be Gizmo.) But Stephen Spielberg insisted that this be changed in order to give the audience a cute lovable hero they could identify with and root for (and this change happened surprisingly late in development, after the Gizmo puppet had been specifically designed to handle the events of the first half of the script, so as a result Gizmo is mostly hanging out in a bag for most of the latter half). Obviously this was the right choice, because of how fondly this movie is remembered as well as the sheer amount of merchandising that was done to profit off of this cute, cuddly mogwai. But I have to wonder- what would this movie have been like if it had gone straight horror, with the cute cuddly "hero" actually becoming the gross, dastardly villain? The whole movie would take on a darker tone just from that one detail, and I genuinely wonder what that movie could have been.

As it is, I do think this is a great movie but I find the constantly-shifting tone kind of jarring at times. To be clear, I did enjoy the comedy, and I did enjoy the horror, I just found it difficult to go along with either for most of the film. But the story is great, the characters are great, the practical effects are phenomenal- if you haven't seen this movie I do highly recommend it.

Overall Rating: 8/10 Smoking Smokeless Ashtrays

Blink And You'll Miss It: This movie has a LOT of tiny background details that made me laugh out loud, but the most noteworthy one comes from one of the scenes where Billy's dad is calling home from a payphone at the inventor's expo. The first time we see him at the phone booth, there's a person in the background sitting in the eponymous vehicle from 1960's The Time Machine. The camera cuts away (to Billy's mom at home, talking on the phone), and when it cuts back, the vehicle and pilot have vanished.