Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (Gremlins 2: The New Batch)

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU'RE AT SOUP???

The spooky month has descended upon us again! It is time, once again, for the real horror to blight me; the constant non-stop writing rush between now and early December. God help me, the snow will be coming by the time my fingers stop moving. Ironic, then, that the inaugural subject for our new and brevity-improved Sixteen Screams marathon is the sequel to a Christmas movie. Yes, Gremlins is a Christmas movie and that's why I'm not covering it here. God help me if I ever wade into the debate about which marathon The Nightmare Before Christmas would belong in. It would help, before we begin, to talk a little about that original movie and what I remember it doing. Certainly I never saw it until I was a teen. As a child, a cousin had the Gremlins 2 game on Game Boy. Its cover art with the Mohawk Gremlin spooked me, but I liked the game. One summer while visiting I found the Gremlins 2 NES game at a flea market. Same cover, but I picked it up. Time has proven that it was a much better game than the Game Boy version. Oh, God. I said I was going to talk about the movie and then I went on a tangent about the Gremlins 2 video game. That was, uhhh, setup for going into talking about the movie. Yeah.

The original Gremlins is an interesting and subversive genre clash of its own. You have this heartwarming and very 80's Spielbergian holiday film about a boy and his strange new friend/pet, lots of charming small town folks, some assholes, the works. Then the Gremlins come in and it all goes to shit, often times in really dark and surprising ways. This is the movie that kills the charming small town folks with a fucking snowplow, which launches its crabby old asshole off her Stairmaster and out the goddamn top story window, which has its female lead state she doesn't like Christmas before telling a horrifically fucked-up story revealing why. It's like blowing up a fucking Norman Rockwell painting from the inside. All that chaotic energy certainly darkens the film and makes it closer to a horror story, but what of its sequel years later?

Gizmo? More like GONZO. This movie. This fucking movie. Its director is let off the chain in full and what results is a live action cartoon. The damn thing runs on cartoon logic at many points, and every bit of slapstick and dumb reference is turned up to 11. The creativity is juiced up as well. I mean, just watch this. That's the making of the movie and you can't tell me otherwise. Well, except for the fact that it's the director and friends who are the ones adding all this wacky shit in. Fuck blowing up a Norman Rockwell painting, the Gremlins are blowing up their own damn movie here. LITERALLY, IN THE CASE OF THAT SCENE WHERE HULK FUCKING HOGAN HAS TO TELL THEM TO SETTLE DOWN. I think my favorite bit is when the security technicians are doing a Cinema Sins-style nitpicking of the Mogwai rules and asking all sorts of what if scenarios that nobody writing the first movie seriously had in mind, all before a fucking Gremlin bursts into the scene and starts biting people. PAY ATTENTION TO THE GODDAMNED MOVIE! NO NITPICK! There's also Leonard Maltin getting strangled as he gives the negative review of Gremlins 1 on VHS. That he agreed to do it is a class act move and a funny joke. 

To say nothing of the sheer creativity on display with the genetics lab setting. All those crazy fucking Gremlin hybrids. Literally throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it's one note like the vegetable Gremlin, but the movie gets some real mileage out of shit like the electric Gremlin or the bat Gremlin. Special mention to the Brain Gremlin, who not only gets enough good bits to count on a hand but is also the figurehead of the Gremlins 2 Institute, a genius galaxy-brain level read of the movie and its deeper themes that I'll leave you with instead of delving further. Brevity, after all. That's where I'm going to call it for now. Gremlins 2 is a delightfully stupid fucking movie that will leave a smile on your face. I wonder where we can find more movies like that? Just absolutely dumb fucking shlock designed to make you laugh at it?

Hmm. I have an idea...