By Kevin Lyons

Source: EOFFTV Review

Conventional wisdom has it that Gremlins 2: The Last Batch, Joe Dante’s follow up to his hit 1984 film Gremlins, is an inferior film. In truth, it’s just a very different film – same idea (the first half is pretty much a remake of the original) but with lots of new jokes, some stinging satire, fewer moments of childhood-scarring darkness (you’ll find no analogue for the father-in-the-chimney speech here) and a big city setting. The original will always be the “better” film by virtue of having come first, but that doesn’t mean that this madcap sequel can be so easily dismissed out of hand.

The Christmas setting of the original is largely abandoned, though Gremlins 2 seems to be set in the early half of December. In New York, slimy business tycoon Daniel Clamp (John Glover), a transparent pop at Donald Trump, already a figure of mockery 26 years before he became US president, has plans to redevelop Chinatown into a soulless shopping centre. The only hold out is Mr Wing (Keye Luke) who still lives behind his shop and who has Gizmo the mogwai (voiced by Howie Mandel) with him. When Wing dies, the shop is demolished and Gizmo ends up at Splice of Life, Inc., a genetic engineering lab in Clamp Tower. Elsewhere in the building, Billy Peltzer (Zach Halligan) and his fiancée Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates), who have located to the Big Apple from Kingston Falls, are working menial jobs for Clamp – he’s an underappreciated and bullied draftsman and designer, she’s a tour guide in the building. When Billy hears someone humming Gizmo’s distinctive song, he rescue the mogwai from the clutches of Dr Catheter (Christopher Lee) and his assistants Martin and Lewis (Don and Dan Stanton).

Inevitably, Gizmo gets wet, spawns dozens of offspring who eat after midnight and transform into a pack of ravening and very aggressive gremlins on the loose (“All they have to do is to eat three or four children and there’d be the most appalling publicity!” frets Catheter.) And so far as plot goes, that’s pretty much it. The rest of the film is one gremlin-based set piece after the other as the curious and ravenous creatures ingest samples from Catheter’s lab (“I could get you diseases – you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he offers) transforming into a winged creature, a femme fatale who takes a shine to Clamp’s head of security (Robert Picardo) and an urbane and articulate “brain gremlin” (voiced by Tony Randall).

To make up for the lack of a plot, Dante and his writer Charles S. Haas pack the film to the rafters with sight gags, cameos (composer Jerry Goldsmith, actors John Astin, Henry Gibson, Rick Ducommun, Bubba Smith and Hulk Hogan, and even Dante himself all turn up and Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph return as Kingston Falls residents the Futtermans) and in-jokes, most of them film related: Octaman (1971) is being broadcast on Clamp’s cable television network (the film also takes aim at Ted Turner), renamed The Octopus People; Catheter is seen carrying a pod suspiciously similar to that seen in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955); any number of Universal classic horrors are quoted; and it goes on and on and on.

Some might find the constant callbacks to the films that informed Dante’s childhood – and even ones he made – all a bit too much, but there’s plenty of other humour to enjoy, much of it of a scabrously satirical bent. Where the earlier film had poked fun at the clichés of small-town American in cinema, principally as imagined by Frank Capra and the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg, the sequel casts a jaundiced eye at big city living – ” this is some crazy city” notes a holidaying Futterman, though the gremlins seem to love it, staging a rousing production number around their rendition of New York, New York. 60s action films, particularly Die Hard (1988) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), genetic engineering, our over-reliance on technology that frequently lets us down, the venality of corporate millionaires and even the film industry itself all come under satirical assault too and the film doesn’t really hold back.

The clever thing about the film is how it manages all this while still somehow being more playful than its predecessor. It feels as though the darker elements of Gremlins had been deliberately toned down to make it more suitable for a family audience, particularly the younger children who had found the first film too scary. It still has its moments – the gremlins covered in pulsating sacs as they prepare to reproduce is a strikingly nasty image – but overall, Dante adopts a lighter touch. Perhaps to reassure anyone still worried by the cartoon-like mayhem (the film begins with a Warner Bros. style cartoon), the film even breaks down at one point, damaged by the gremlins, prompting a moment of weird self-reflexiveness as an angry mother (Dante regular Belinda Balaski, who had also been in the first film) to complain to the cinema manager (Paul Bartel) that “this is worse than the first one!”

The cast tend to play second fiddle to the gremlins created by Rick Baker’s Cinovation Studio but Christopher Lee stands out in a role that requires him to disappear for great lengths, but which gives him plenty of splendid dialogue to savour – “oh splendid, this must be my malaria” he exclaims gleefully when taking delivery of some new samples. He seems to have had a ball on the film, enjoying both the experience of working alongside Baker’s manic creations and the exposure that a big budget – though not entirely successful – blockbuster brought him. It’s often easy to forget that he could do comedy rather well and the chance to deadpan his way through lines like ” I swear to God, young man, I will never hurt anything ever again. There are some things that man is not meant to splice” is one he grasps with real relish.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch is unapologetically unruly, Dante skating perilously close to self-indulgence at times (film critic Leonard Maltin, who had pasted the original film, gets attacked by vengeful gremlins on the set of his new television show, while brandishing a videocassette of Gremlins) but just reins it in in time. You don’t see mainstream Hollywood films as wild and manic as this being made any more.

Sadly, despite toning down the horror, the film didn’t perform anywhere near as well at the box office as the original (it opened on the same day in the States as Dick Tracy and couldn’t compete with all the star power that far lesser film was able to bring to bear). It put a stop to the Gremlins franchise and apart from a few fan films, it remained dormant for many years, despite Dante’s best efforts to get a third film off the ground. And then in mid-2022, a third film, referred to by Dante on social media as Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, seemed to be edging closer to production. Whether it gets made, and whether its as anarchic, silly and as much fun as Gremlins 2 will remain to be seen.