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.