MIDDLE-AGED MATINEE! #14 - 'Gremlins'

In “Gremlins”, a young man named Billy (Zach Galligan) receives an unusual gift from his father. It is a new pet known as a mogwai and Billy names him Gizmo. However, there are three rules when taking care of Gizmo: keep him out of the sunlight, don’t expose him to water, and don’t feed him after midnight. Of course, those rules are quickly broken and Gizmo violently gives birth to other mogwai.

However, these are different from Gizmo. They eventually morph into something more grotesque and violent. Soon, Billy’s whole town is being terrorized by these disgusting new monsters.

The movie, directed by Joe Dante and produced by Steven Spielberg, was a huge hit when it was initially released. However, critics and some families questioned how the movie got a PG rating when there was more than enough violence to potentially prompt a higher rating.

In fact, it was this movie and Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” that made Spielberg question why there wasn’t another rating somewhere in between the lighter PG rating and the hard R rating. Due to this, the MPAA eventually responded with a new rating known as PG-13.

Gizmo, the famous mogwai that gives birth to the "Gremlins"!

The movie is darkly funny and the violence within is a stark constrast to the idealic Christmas setting of the movie. The story itself is aware of this contradiction and it shows even more when the film’s female lead, Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates), talks about hating Christmas due to a tragic accident involving her father years before the movie.

To be fair, I can understand how this movie got a PG rating at the time of its release. The whole affair is relatively bloodless despite a few minor scars here and there. Most of the blood that is seen is the vile green blood of the Gremlins as one of them is dispatched in a delightfully absurd way.

That’s another reason I don’t take the violence too seriously. Dante amps up the violence to such a cartoonish level that it’s hard to really take any of it too serious. And that is exactly what Dante wanted to do which was make a movie that was a gleefully dark and fun horror comedy.

Billy faces off against the leader of the "Gremlins".

The characters in the movie are memorable. Galligan did a good job as the innocent Billy, Cates was just as dependable here as she was in any of the films she appeared in during the ‘80s, and Corey Feldman was good as Billy’s kid friend, Pete Fountaine. Of course, with a film named “Gremlins”, you don’t necessarily come for the humans.

The special-effects for the Gizmo and the Gremlins were done by special-effects wizard Chris Walas. He would later be better known as the guy who created all the gnarly effects for David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly”. Here, he makes a Gizmo that we genuinely care about while making sinister monsters that gross us out.

What can I say, this is a quintessential film of the 1980s. It’s a Spielberg infused family film and a smash hit for Dante. It would go on to spawn a sequel, “Gremlins 2: The New Batch”, and a third film has been in development hell for decades. No matter how the film series turned out, though, this original film is an exciting and darkly funny ride that is always worth taking!