So you might recall a few months ago when I caught a screening of GREMLINS. That afternoon was my first experience with the film in possibly twenty years, and I was actually surprised at how well the film had held up.

However, that was just me talking…a cat who’d seen the film as an impressionable young lad and had those memories to fall back on. How would the film hold up to fresh eyes? One way to find out: Put it to the test that my Falling for The First Time series has become.

Jake Cole from Not Just Movies has joined me for this critique. Full discussion on how well Gizmo, Stripe, and Billy have stood up beyond the jump.

MH: Be honest – you want a pet mogwai now, don’t you?

JC: Jesus, who on Earth wouldn’t? I actually felt sad for Billy at the end. Then again, we all saw how creepy the damn Furby turned out

MH: You didn’t comment on my post about the GREMLINS screening, which is odd because you always comment on my posts after you read them. (Hey wait, that means…) Did you have any expectations going into Joe dante’s GREMLINS?

JC: Being a fan of Dante’s SMALL SOLDIERS, I expected to see some satire and playfulness in GREMLINS.

MH: A realistic bar for the film to clear. How did it measure up?

JC: Satire and playfulness were exactly what I got. I think you can still see Dante in a sort of embryonic form here – the movie was uneven and kind of fell apart at the end; the actors weren’t all that committed – but overall I thought GREMLINS was a wicked little film that messed with a lot of genre conventions and had a surprisingly political bent.

MH: Yeah, I don’t think I caught that political bent when I saw it as a kid (as political as I was at the age of seven). That message is a little bit crazy, don’t you think?

JC: Well, on one level, the film plays to the classic cartoons like Tom & Jerry, which were outrageously violent but aimed at children. On another, it shows an extrapolation to the Reagan era, the time of all those gory, amoral action films that dominated the box office. The gremlins run through a broad pastiche of ’80s culture, and there’s more than a slight hint that TV aids their violent streak.

The political satire isn’t nearly as honed as it is in SMALL SOLDIERS, but you can see Dante poking fun at the decadence and increasing inundation to violence that marked ’80s culture. There’s even a hint of commentary on Western ethnocentrism in the film’s foreign distribution: Dante went to the trouble of adding region-specific pop culture jokes for each language dub, which undoubtedly made it a bigger success in those markets.

MH: Don’t forget too that the film aludes to gremlins as a secretive method that foreigners use to keep America down. that they send them to y’all in trojan horses designed as foreign cars and electronics, and when your stuff stops working that it’s the gremlins at work. What about the film did you enjoy the most?

JC: I think that, more than sociopolitical satire, GREMLINS works best as an attack on the pop culture that grows out of it. It’s funny that we’re talking about this film because of the comment I left on your SCARFACE post with Bob, because I saw De Palma all over this.

Dante shares a clear disdain for the studio system that promotes these kinds of films; note that he mashes together genre tropes from mainstream fare (teen movies, Christmas morality plays) with B-grade schlock (creature-feature horror, the low-grade staple of the mystical Chinese shop) as if there’s no difference between the two. De Palma’s own 1984 film, BODY DOUBLE, is much more explicit and extreme in pointing out similar signs of cultural decay, but Dante actually makes a film that works within mainstream parameters.

MH: What about Spielberg’s influence on the film?

JC: I was amused, though, at how many swipes he at least indirectly aims at Steven Spielberg, who executive-produced the film. Dante already shows a tacit bitterness over not getting to enjoy the same freedoms that Spielberg and his colleagues got a decade ago, and he makes fun of Spielberg’s Disney fetish by showing the violent, stupid gremlins being stupefied by SNOW WHITE. But Spielberg was nice enough to give Dante final cut despite disliking aspects of the film, especially that hilariously grim story Phoebe Cates’ character relates about a traumatic Christmas.

MH: The last line of Cates’ monologue got a twisted laugh at the screening I attended. This film is rather dependent on effects, which can give a film a definite “best before” date. Do the effects hold up?

JC: I think they still work fine. For one thing, I think Dante intends them to look a bit cheesy. Now, anyone who reads my blog knows how much I hate the lazy argument of “It’s meant to be bad,” but when this tongue-in-cheek approach is done well, it can be incredibly entertaining.

I think the mogwai hold up better than the transformed gremlins, but Dante gets the most comedy out of the latter, so I’d say he was having fun. I also really liked the scene where the sinister mogwai throws itself into a pool to multiply. The resulting light and fog of the bubbling pool is pure B-cinema, but it looks good and is so ridiculous you have to laugh.

MH: It’s funny how far we’ve come from a film like this having to rely on animatronics and stop-motion, and much of the digital effects are the images that aren’t aging well. So the effects don’t really date the film?

JC: I would actually say that the film around the effects has dated more, considering it’s such an explicit commentary on ’80s pop and social culture. The acting is more visibly stiff and the specifics of Dante’s parodies lack bite so far removed from relevance, though the overarching message is still applicable, sadly. Hell, I think the most dated element in the film may be the fact that an Asian-made car doesn’t work as well as American models.

MH: Yeah – and that we’re to assume that the manufacturer of the American model hasn’t needed a federal bail-out. So if the effects hold up and the broad story holds up, is there anything in particular about the film that does feel “so 80’s”?

JC: If anything, we’re even farther down the road from what Dante was criticizing. Flashy but harmless hip-hop posturing gave way to acceptance of gangsta rap as an ideal for bored suburbia, and microwaving a puppet is tame compared to seeing the same thing done to a human in KICK-ASS. In some ways, GREMLINS is as relevant as ever in its depiction of violent pop culture rotting the minds of mainstream audiences, but the cultural touchstones he uses for that attack almost seem quaint looking back from an even more extreme culture.

MH: Observant! It sounds like you had a lot of fun with GREMLINS, was there anything to the film that you weren’t so crazy about?

JC: I think Dante reaches a bit beyond his grasp at this point in his career. He’s not yet sure how to sublimate his satire into his overall genre parody, so there’s an incongruity between the scenes, say, in the antique shop and the moments where he makes fun of gaudy ’80s culture. It builds up to the point that I would actually say that the last 20 minutes of non-stop action and broad comedy is less entertaining than the more subdued and subtle commentary that led to it. Besides, once you nuke a gremlin in a microwave, there’s nowhere to go but down, really.

MH: That gives me a bit of hope. Your qualms seem to be with the storytelling and not with the story being told. In the last post I did about GREMLINS, I talked about watching kids watching the film and how it reminded me of seeing it for the first time as a kid. When this film first came out, I can clearly remember how much it was marketed at kids (in my case, the marketing worked).

How appropriate would you say the film is for kids? Especially for those under 10-years-old?

JC: Hmmm, hard to say. It’s certainly not hard to see why the film, along with TEMPLE OF DOOM, got the PG-13 rating installed — it’s far too tame to warrant even a light R rating, but I can see why parents wouldn’t want their kids to see it. But I do think it’s cartoony enough to play to children and not scar them. Like I said, it’s got that Tom & Jerry feel to it that lampoons the violence, and let’s be honest: those kids saw Stallone and Schwarzenegger films every summer.

MH: I didn’t.

JC: Besides, I tend to think of the ’80s itself as something marketed to children but entirely inappropriate for them (or anyone else), and GREMLINS is one of the less offensive things kids could easily see during that decade.

I do think it’s interesting, though, that they actually would market this to kids. Notice how chaste the relationship between Billy and Kate is: if they’d showed even a bit of skin, you can bet no one would have tried to sell it as a film fit for the whole family. Goes to show how violence always seems to fly under the radar with minimal problems.

MH: Well said. Alright buddy, I’m hoping the streak ends today – How would you score GREMLINS on a scale of 1 to 5?

JC: I hate to seem like I’m keeping the record going, but I really would give it a 3.5/5. It loses steam near the end and some of its stiff aspects, whether intentional or not, grate, but it is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek take on Hollywood (d)evolution in the ’80s and a legitimately funny and occasionally inventive comedy in its own right

MH: Dammit! What’s it going to take for a film to score at least a 4!!?? Thanks Jake, your observations are both astute and amusing.