Piranha

Paced to express the mounting sense of anxiety felt by the film's lead couple, Joe Dante's Piranha starts out leisurely, bordering on sluggish, before slowly building to full-on, adrenal mania. Heather Menzies plays Maggie McKeown, a spunky skiptracer hot on the trail of two teenagers who skinny-dipped in the wrong pool. Along the way she recruits Bradford Dillman's topped-up drunk Paul to help investigate the disappearance. The pair stumble on a semi-abandoned military research tank (the kind that holds water) which they promptly, thoughtlessly, drain. Unfortunately, this bone-clogged cauldron housed a strain of super aggressive, selectively bred, piranha, able to survive in the cold, local waters.

After a couple of run-ins with the film's buzzing, agitated shoals, Maggie and Paul abandon their emerging relationship to arrive at a state of total, propulsive motion. This unceasing advance hits a peak 79 minutes into the film - editors Dante and Mark Goldblatt assemble a short, delirious sequence that mixes on-water stunt falls; a speedboat crashing through a smaller vessel (and the subsequent explosion); massing, carnivorous fish and, finally, our heroes launching themselves into space in a stolen, slow-motion police car. Dante's film may be slight in terms of storytelling - a quickly produced cash-in hoping to ride Jaws' wake - but it's assembled in a way that extracts maximum impact out of its (comparatively) meagre budget. The Piranha attacks manage to be both protracted and frenzied. The film's micro maulings communicated with churning, underwater collages that knit together images of teeth, injury and clouding, dilute blood.

Twilight Zone: The Movie

Time Out

John Landis kicks off the anthology with Time Out, a finger-wagger about a bigot getting a taste of his own medicine. Conceptually, Time Out is like one of those Star Trek episodes were the primary creative impulse seems to be that the studio had a load of period sets going spare. Vic Morrow's racist middle-manager is bounced between several confrontations in which he is no longer viewed as a well-to-do white man. Movie money elevates the premise - instead of airless TV corners we get well-dressed spaces full of detailing and furniture for Morrow to collide with. Thanks to John Landis' cavalier / criminal approach to stunt safety and child labour laws, Morrow and (unseen in this version) co-stars Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen were killed by a falling helicopter while shooting the segment's feel good ending. Time Out is therefore truncated, Landis and his story stuck revelling in the kind of sadism needed to power a profound character change.


Kick the Can

Steven Spielberg's segment is a treacly aside about a magical old man who can reverse the ageing process. Scatman Crothers' Mr Bloom breezes between retirement homes, stirring up the residents with talk of eternal youth. Kick the Can is the most naked and malformed of Spielberg's youth deifications. Evan Richards' gangly teen, seen here prancing around like Peter Pan, doesn't evoke the (apparently) intended magical whimsy, his presence instead registering as insistent, even creepy. Since this is a Spielberg film there's some intense emotional violence buried in the sugary premise. The exclusion of Bill Quinn's disbeliever Leo Conroy is pointed and painful, never more so than when the pensioner pleads to be taken away by his newly youthful friend (lover? There's clearly a lifelong connection between the two). Spielberg prods at Conroy's teary eyeline, capturing the exact moment that the elderly man's heart breaks.


It's a Good Life

Joe Dante pulls Twilight Zone: The Movie back on track with a contribution that revolves around a bored schoolteacher who inadvertently wanders into the realm of an omnipotent pre-teen. Jeremy Licht's Anthony is a capricious God whose idea of paradise doesn't stretch too far beyond never-ending TV sessions and plates heaving with sugary junk food. Kathleen Quinlan's Helen is a picture of glassy-eyed alarm as she creeps deeper into Anthony's subconscious. The child has surrounded himself with a collection of adult sycophants who pretend to be his adoring family on pain of animated death. To keep them in line this little dictator summons up rubbery Rob Bottin abominations that actualise the deranged, elastic energy of a Tex Avery cartoon. The entire segment teeters on the edge of a full-blown meltdown, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but with a family friendly rating.


Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

George Miller's MVP contribution is a thundering, adrenalised reworking of Richard Donner and Richard Matheson's 1963 TV episode. The original programme had a nervous William Shatner trying to keep a lid on things after he sees a gremlin vandalising the plane he's travelling on. John Lithgow takes the lead for this retelling, delivering an absolutely deranged performance. Shatner's character began his nightmare somewhat sane, a middle-aged man pleased with himself after recovering from a nervous breakdown. Lithgow is manic before he's even gone near his window seat. The segment opens with Lithgow locked in the toilet tearing at his hair. Miller accentuates the unease with a couple of tricks designed to simulate a plane ride from hell. The camera is never stable, bobbing along as if passing through light turbulence. A constant high-pitched whine is buried in the mix, the kind of  ambient fizz you feel between your ears before your plane begins its descent and they start popping. Lithgow's fellow passengers are an aggressive, uncooperative bunch, moving constantly while the poor soul tries to dredge up a memory of having been relaxed. Even time seems to lurch uneasily. A child bleats in Lithgow's face one minute, then is seen curled up in a deep sleep the next. Miller uses every trick in the book to keep the mood hysterical, there's not a single second that Lithgow isn't under some form of attack.

Gremlins

Gremlins is a curious film. It spends a good deal of its run-time devoted to outlining the dynamics of a dwindling small town. Property owner Mrs Deagle holds financial sway over the community, with the local bank deep in her pockets. This snarl faced harridan swaggers around town jumping queues and making threats: sick children are labeled deadbeats while cute, mischievous, dogs are, if Deagle gets her way, to be put to death in the most hideous ways. There seems to be a bubbling sub-plot about duplicitous land grabbing, with the locals hoping and praying for some way to vanquish this capitalist pig and secure financial self-determination for themselves. When Hoyt Axton's cack-handed inventor Rand Peltzer smuggles a cuddly critter into this milieu there's an idea that this will be their salvation, doubly so when this super-pet begins wildly reproducing after being exposed to water.

Thankfully, this twee, heart-warming premise is almost immediately junked. Like the central creature, Gremlins mutates from a cutesy Christmas special into a ruthless little video nasty. Peripheral characters are either explicitly killed off or disappear completely following the varmint's apocalyptic midnight orgy. The majority of the human cast we spent the first act meeting are jettisoned to concentrate all of our attention on an army of cackling little bastards that have sprung up in their place. It's easy to understand why the filmmakers okayed this swerve, the Gremlins are a complete delight. They exemplify an animalistic sense of mischief but not one that operates in pursuit of food or other such sustenance. Instead they calibrated with the whimsical violence of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Everything is hilarious to them and they have zero sense of self-preservation. As a species they think nothing of breaking their bodies for their craft.

Gremlins is completely in love with its monsters, and the possibilities they offer then. Massive stretches of director Joe Dante's film revolves around time-out sequences where we get to see the Gremlins just being themselves - drinking, smoking and dancing. They perform little skits that usually end in dismemberment, seemingly for their own amusement. Their manic, slapstick tastes are only ever calmed by a pre-dawn screening of vintage Disney; 'tis Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that soothes these savage beasts. Perhaps this is why Gremlins is so entertaining? The film isn't particularly interested in delivering on its own, ramshackle set-ups or the boring arcs that could then be plotted from them. Instead it's obsessed with puppetry and sight gags. Gremlins is a film firmly aware that seeing Judge Reinhold stumble around a reheated B-plot about a small town yuppie is about a millionth as engaging as seeing minute after minute of three foot tall demons gobbling up glass by the handful.