GREMLINS 2 THE NEW BATCH
A cautionary tale set in a Frank Capra universe, Joe Dante’s original Gremlins (1984) gives us a kindhearted, unsuccessful inventor named Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) who buys a furry little creature called Mogwai as a Christmas present for his teenage son Billy (Zach Galligan). He finds Mogwai in Chinatown, in a curio shop run by the sage Mr. Wing (Keye Luke), who doesn’t want to sell it, but Wing’s practical-minded grandson, who says they need the money, arranges the deal anyway. Peltzer is warned to follow three rules of animal maintenance: keep Mogwai out of the light, don’t get it wet, and, above all, never feed it after midnight. After Peltzer brings it home, he names the pet Gizmo, reflecting his own taste in crackpot inventions.
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This may constitute the “story” of Gremlins, but the thrust of the movie actually lies elsewhere–in a contradiction and repudiation of everything the story seems to be saying on the surface. Just as cute Mogwai becomes a gaggle of monsters, Gremlins in effect conjures up a second movie, diametrically opposed to the first, that gleefully assaults everything the first movie holds sacred: Christmas, Norman Rockwell’s America, consumer society, and good old-fashioned family entertainment. And while the moral side of the movie can be taken as either sincere or cynical, the amoral side seems to break up like the gremlins themselves into an infinity of possible meanings. The marauding beasties can be plausibly read at various points as adolescents, preadolescents, blacks, rednecks, Native Americans, cowboys, Walt Disney fans, chainsaw killers, bums, bikers–anyone can add to the list. It is important to stress, however, that they are true-blue American. Though Mogwai starts off associated with Chinese culture, gremlins are clearly the product of American recklessness; a running gag that continues into Gremlins 2 is the xenophobic neighbor (Dick Miller) who automatically associates every problem that comes up with a foreign invasion of some kind. Furthermore, it’s faintly implied in both Gremlins and its sequel that TV, which Wing despises, has a corrupting effect on Mogwai quite apart from the accidents that lead to his proliferation.
Unlike its predecessor, Gremlins 2 has no ambiguous attitudes about its world and its characters, or any subversive agenda apart from its up-front satire. What you see and hear is what you get; it’s often funny but never very profound. The movie invites you to get lost in its amusing details, but it lacks both the suspense and the occasional scariness of the original.
Quite literally, Daffy and Dante weren’t speaking to these guys at all. And when it came to the weekday matinee, all the mothers and baby-sitters had bustled off their kids long before the first of Daffy’s interjections; by the time of the last wisecrack, I was the only one left, apart from a few ushers who were cleaning up.
Nearly all the dark elements in the original are kept firmly under wraps. Nobody dies this time except for the mad scientist–an updated Dr. Moreau type called Dr. Catheter (Christopher Lee), who is more a juicy movie icon than a character in his own right. There’s also much less cruelty here, nothing like the stingy old lady in Gremlins–fashioned after Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life and Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz–who fantasizes about torturing Billy’s beloved dog, or the gremlins’ hanging the same dog from the porch ceiling with a string of Christmas-tree lights.
