Critters

For its many lighter moments, Critters is careful to balance its laughs with a number of chills. It unabashedly and wittily pays homage to other films. But ultimately it stands firmly on its own, a little bit frightening and a lot of fun. [15 Apr 1986, p.3C]

Judging from the title, Spielberg's Gremlins would be the immediate target, and indeed Critters does share a sardonic similarity. In fact, Critters looks like several dozen films without looking like any one of them, the action and characters lifted whole from a dissimilar plethora of cinematic sources and underscored with a sizzling sarcasm which elevates it from its source material.

Derivative but tongue-in-cheek enough to have a following.

Critters is a dumb, but sometimes likable little movie: maybe an odd comment, since it contains savage killings, mutilations and general bloodshed and evisceration. [25 Apr 1986, p.8]

One of the most enjoyable films of the summer, Critters harks back to the low-budget science fiction films of the 1950s and balances the thrills with heavy doses of humor.

Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise.

Critters resemble oversize hairballs and roll like tumbleweeds when prodded into action, the perfect menace for this irritatingly insipid and lightweight film which unfolds with plodding predictability and leaves few cliches unturned.

Classic 80s horror. Good mix of humour, likeable characters, and horror. What this pulls off that none of the sequels managed to capture is a sense of suspense where the characters actually feel like they're in danger. It's hard to balance with its goofiness, but Critters pulls it off nicely!

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Critters is an absolute joy to watch. For a film that is so clearly a rip off of Gremlins, it manages to actually meet the quality of the original.

If the movie "Gremlins" struck me as odd, yet fun, this film, released at about the same time, is much more surreal, as the script is based on the arrival of a plague in a rural Kansas village: furry, voracious, toothy, deadly aliens. I confess, I'm not a fan of alien movies. And seeing these flesh-eating fur balls is not strictly something I'd ever think to see again, even though I found the movie, overall, tolerable. It's a film where comedy and sci-fi go hand in hand and where suspense reigns... there are also some tense, though not scary, scenes. The script is basically what I said: a group of furry and particularly voracious creatures flee the stellar authorities (something the film quickly forgets) and decide to come to our planet, where they begin to feed in a rural house, where the family that lives there quickly begins to fear for their lives. Simple, direct, functional, effective, with no major problems other than a few loose ends to explain or one or two sub-plots that were forgotten in the middle of everything else. The cast does its job effectively and without major demerits. The film's family seems to us to be quite credible in their way of acting and relating, with a nice couple, two teenage children and normal fights between siblings. The youngest turns out to have a more evident role, and is very well played by Scott Grimes. Billy Green Bush and Dee Wallace are safe bets and give us solid work. Nadine Van Der Velde is equally effective. On a technical level, the film bets a lot on creating an alien that can be funny and threatening at the same time... the result is not bad, and we almost managed to empathize with those devouring creatures. I don't know how they did it, but the creatures seem credible and authentic enough. The visual, special and sound effects used are equally good, most of the time: I just didn't like the excessive futurisms on the spaceship, because the effects used look very dated and cheap, even considering the film's age.

Escaping from a specially-built prison asteroid, a tribe of spiny, sharp-toothed little fuzzballs land in the Kansas farmland, seeking food and mayhem in equal parts. While a local nuclear family investigates the correlating disturbances in their barn, a pair of shape-shifting bounty hunters touch down, change their appearance to pass as human and explore the town in search of the tiny fugitives. Critters is a case of all or nothing. In a few very specific instances, it works shockingly well. The bounty hunters are a riot, deathly serious while completely oblivious to why they're raising suspicion amongst the locals. Here’s a hint: even in the mid ‘80s, there weren’t a lot of glamorously feather-haired rock stars marching around the Bible belt wearing head-to-toe red leather. One dumbfounded native sums it up succinctly: they “look like they was from Los Angeles.” Which might as well be Uranus, as these folks are concerned. So the hunters are a worthwhile addition; comic relief and well-armed backup all rolled into one. The creatures look reasonably good, too. They’re unique, with a few odd defense mechanisms and a quaint habit for ominously rolling through the dusty terrain like dark tumbleweeds. And we don’t want for blood or guts when they’re around. They even kill off a teenage Billy Zane while he’s trying to get laid! That’s about the extent of the good news. The bad news is, we only catch sight of the good stuff in limited quantities. Very limited quantities. Far too much running time is dedicated to the dull little family and their dreary little community, wasted attempts at character development that go absolutely nowhere. The interminable wait for **** to hit fan is excruciating amidst so much trite, ham-fisted exposition. Where did the tiny gray demons go? Can they have these people for dinner already?