“Staff Picks” is a deeper look into movies that we love here at Video CULTure. Each edition of this column will focus on a single film that we think you should check out, either for the first time or for a long-overdue revisit.
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By Patrick Bartlett (Twitter: @alleywaykrew)
Weirdly, there is a lot of discussion these days about what should be considered a Christmas movie. Most of it admittedly centers around “Die Hard” (which is absolutely a Christmas movie, by the way) but whenever I admit that my favorite Christmas movie is “Gremlins”, people lose their minds. I don’t care. It’s a great Christmas movie. In fact, “Gremlins” is one of the best movies ever made full stop.
I will start by saying that “Gremlins” is a movie that is nearly as old as I am. I mention that because it’s been with me basically my whole life. I have a different relationship to it now than I did when I first saw it though. I first laid eyes on it probably at age four or five. I watched it with my dad and was scared out of my mind. Granted, I don’t think I said anything to anyone about that. I saw “Robocop” at around the same time and even though parts of that movie also really freaked me out, I didn’t want any movies held back from me so I kept my fear to myself. To this day, the entire sequence with Billy and the gremlin in the school still scares me on a certain level due to how much it frightened me as a small child. It will probably always be something I carry with me. It’s a scar that I’m glad to have though. I’m willing to bet that most horror geeks hold the first movies that really upset them as sacred. I know that sounds bizarre but it’s the power of horror. I love most genre cinema but nothing else but horror really has that quality. When I told my dad about my childhood reaction recently, he just responded that he always thought of “Gremlins” as a comedy. He’s not entirely wrong. That’s what makes for the best horror comedies though, I guess. It’s equally scary and funny. It’s a balancing act that I think most horror fans greatly appreciate when they realize it because of how rare it is. Direct Joe Dante does it effortlessly in “Gremlins”.
The reason that the “PG-13” rating exists is in no small part to “Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom” and this film. This is a Joe Dante movie but Steven Spielberg’s name is above the title (he was an executive producer) and it was sold on his name. This is from a period of time where Spielberg wasn’t just a brand in film (especially family films), he was THE brand. In a post-E.T. and Indy world, Spielberg’s name meant whatever you were about to see was safe for the entire family to enjoy. Until 1984. Both “Gremlins” and Temple of Doom were released that year within a matter of weeks of each other and parents were quickly up in arms. Granted, I’m stating all of this anecdotally since I was barely cognizant at the time but it was decided that for movies like this, there had to be a rating that signified “more than PG” but less than an “R”. The best part about this fact is, in the case of “Gremlins” is that it could have been so much worse.
The script for “Gremlins” was written by Chris Columbus, who would eventually go on to make the first two Home Alone movies, the first two Harry Potters, “Mrs. Doubtfire”, etc. In the ’90s, he was probably an even safer brand than Spielberg. His original script for this was a lot darker and more violent than what eventually made it to the screen though. You can find more about it with a quick Google search but all I’ll say here is that you know how Billy’s mom makes it all the way to the end of the movie? In the script, she doesn’t even make it through the second act. Both Dante and Spielberg wanted a more family-oriented movie, so things were toned down into a prototypical PG-13 film.
I suppose I’ve been discussing the movie as if everyone has seen it but I’ve learned over the last several years that I shouldn’t assume that. The basic story being told is you have an inventor named Rand Peltzer who comes across an animal in Chinatown that he’s never heard of called a Mogwai. Mogwis are furry, smart little creatures that look kind of like koalas for lack of a better comparison. The one he meets is as adorable as one can fathom and he thinks would be the perfect present for his son, Billy, for Christmas. The old man who owns the mogwai refuses to sell it to him, so the old man’s grandson goes behind his grandfather’s back to sell the creature to Rand. Billy is more or less grown up but still living with his parents and working at the local bank while he nurses dreams of becoming a cartoonist. Rand gives the mogwai, named Gizmo, to Billy when he gets home and tells him the three rules for mogwai ownership as related to him by the grandson in Chinatown: you can never get them wet, you can’t expose them to bright light (sunlight will even kill them), and you can absolutely never feed them after midnight.
Well, it turns out if you get them wet, they multiply. Gizmo gets a small amount of water spilled on him and ends up with five new friends that are much less adorable and substantially more ill-tempered. Those “friends” are able to trick Billy into feeding them after midnight and he wakes up to find them all in what appear to be cocoons. When they emerge, they’ve gone from furry to reptilian in appearance and go from having foul tempers to being legitimately murderous. They wreak havoc on the town while Billy and Gizmo try to stop them before it’s too late. It took me years, along with seeing “Gremlins 2: The New Batch”, to realize that Gizmo is actually the bad gremlin. That sounds weird. It’s true though. Clearly, the mogwai are to gremlins what caterpillars are to butterflies. They are just the first stage of the life cycle. They’re not supposed to obey the rules. They should be trying to reach their final form and replicate. It makes more sense when you find out that Gizmo was supposed to be the leader of the Gremlins but when Spielberg saw how cute he was, he knew people wouldn’t want to see him turn into a villainous character so a separate gremlin leader, called Stripe, was created instead.
Let’s be honest. The three rules don’t entirely make sense when you really think about it. How can you not feed a mogwai after midnight? It’s always after midnight. For that matter, which midnight? The midnight where they currently are, the midnight where they came from, etc.? Also, how does any kind of life on this planet survive without water? Moreover, there’s water everywhere. There’s literally water molecules in the air, not to mention the snow the gremlins are walking around in. It’s not something to get hung up on though. It’s not really the point. This film belongs to fantasy almost as much as any other genre it’s bending. It’s a modern fable and cartoon brought to life.
I can say that the cartoony elements of the movie all feel like the influence of Joe Dante and they’re a big part of why “Gremlins” works. The story goes that Dante came onto Spielberg’s radar when he directed the Roger Corman-produced “Jaws” rip-off titled “Piranha”. Spielberg really liked it and after Dante finished “The Howling”, he was brought on board to direct “Gremlins”. This is a really special era for Dante and why he’s always been one of my favorite filmmakers. While many directors struggle to balance comedy in horror in even one movie, Dante was able to manage it for several in a row. On top of that, he did it on a grander scale almost every time. It’s largely why “Gremlins” works as well as it does. You have Spielberg’s sentimentality mixed with Joe Dante’s manic style and it just strikes a perfect balance.
Speaking of perfect tonal balance, probably the most famous scene here is when Kate, who’s played by the luminous Phoebe Cates and has been Billy’s love interest throughout the film, finally reveals why she hates Christmas. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie but it was a scene that the studio wanted removed, a scene even Spielberg didn’t like but supported Joe Dante’s assertion that it was an encapsulation of the whole movie- a story both hilarious and horrifying.
There are some things I haven’t touch on, like Chris Walas’ amazing practical effects, but as horror host and genre personality Joe Bob Briggs once said… it is possible to know too much about a movie. I find more and more people that haven’t seen Gremlins every year and that’s tragic. If you haven’t seen this film, seek it out. Watch it by yourself or even better, show it to any kids you might have in your life. It’s something to hold with you. “Gremlins” is an almost thirty-six year old film, sure, but it truly is evergreen (just like a Christmas tree or even the gremlins themselves).
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch