Blast from the Past Movie Review: GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (1990)

Probably one of the earliest signs of my interest in horror film and fiction was when I wanted to see the film Gremlins 2 when it came out in 1990, when I was a little over five years old. Being rather conservative and possessing a great deal of common sense, Mom and Dad said no. Although I may have seen bits and bobs of it here and there on television, I never saw the complete film until The Plaza Theater in Atlanta hosted a special spaced-out COVID screening. So wanting to support a local theater--where, incidentally, I'd seen the first film--and figuring I could see the film in theaters at last, off I went...

The Plot

Some years after the events of the first film, Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) is working in New York City as an artist for a media firm headed by the technology-obsessed developer Daniel Clamp (John Glover). He's trying to save money so he and Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates), who works as a tour guide at the same building, can get married. Unfortunately the elderly Mr. Wing (Keye Luke) has died, allowing Clamp to buy out his curiosity shop. The benign gremlin Gizmo escapes the destruction of the shop, but is captured by scientists conveniently from a lab in the Clamp property where Billy works. Billy rescues him from unpleasant medical experimentation, but some misunderstandings involving Billy's lecherous supervisor Marla Bloodstone (Haviland Morris) and a janitor get Gizmo wet. The Gremlins are unleashed once more on New York City, all while Kate becomes suspicious that Billy is cheating on her with Marla.

The Good

*The film retains a lot of the goofball physical humor of the original. Although I didn't like it nearly as much as the first film (more on that later), there were several moments where I did laugh out loud.

*Although I didn't like creator Joe Dante's decision to make this film a satire of the original film and film sequels in general, it did spawn a couple good jokes--one involves trying to find loopholes in the rules governing Gizmo and another involves an appearance by Leonard Maltin.

*Galligan and Cates are just as adorable as Billy and Kate as they are in the first film. Glover is entertaining as Clamp, a good-hearted combination of Donald Trump and Ted Turner with a cable television empire and a flair for turning everything into a way to promote himself. Robert Prosky is fun as "Grandpa Fred," a Grandpa Munster knockoff who hosts a horror show for the network.

*The special effects team are clearly having fun with all the new creatures the dramatically larger budget could buy.

The Bad

*The film would have probably been a lot funnier when it came out in 1990, but seeing it in 2020 it came off as very dated. There are jokes about the Phantom of the Opera musical (premiering in New York in 1988), as I mentioned earlier Billy's ultimate boss is a cross between Ted Turner and Donald Trump, a supporting character is a Japanese tourist who can't stop taking photos, and one of the gags involves Hulk Hogan. It lacks the timeless quality of the original.

*The film feels more disjointed than the original, like a bunch of gags (often funny, I admit) strung together.

*There was no need for the Looney Tunes segment at the beginning of the film. That's not why we're here. More broadly, rather than the dark comedy of the original, this one is just a bunch of slapstick humor that didn't work as well. Joe Dante apparently had more creative control over this one than the original and although as an artist myself I prefer more creative freedom than less, sometimes having someone able to tell somebody "no" is a good idea.

*The supporting cast is much weaker than in the original. The first film gave us the vile Mrs. Deagle, Billy's doomed high-school teacher, his eccentric and inept father and his kick-ass mother (seriously, watch the kitchen battle), and even that kid who hangs out with Billy despite being around half his age. Although Christopher Lee playing a mad scientist is a nice genre in-joke, he's in the movie too little to impress.

(Seriously, Lee would've been better as the film's human villain. Robert Picardo's Forster, the building's jerky security chief, doesn't measure up to Mrs. Deagle as a human antagonist.) 

Bringing back the Futtermans (apparently they didn't die in the first film) and giving them much bigger roles didn't help either. They were much better in smaller doses in first film, but the second film turns Mr. Futterman into an action hero.

*Some of the attempts to recapture the magic of the original fail, like Kate describing another holiday she hates.

*The film had a $50M budget to work with, as opposed to the $11M of the original. It seems all they spent on this was more Gremlins, some early 1990s CGI that's rather recognizable as such, and hiring Christopher Lee to play a mad scientist. Would've been better to invest it in a funnier script--perhaps they could have released it later and had Chris Columbus write it like the first time?

*Although it's around the same runtime as the first film, it felt a lot longer, probably it wasn't nearly as funny.

*Why do Billy and Kate need to save money to get married? They're already living together and both have full-time jobs. Unless they were planning on having kids very quickly and having Kate quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom, they seem financially pretty fine. If they wanted to avoid the obvious question of "why don't they just courthouse it," maybe Kate has rather impractical wedding dreams for someone with her family's income? Ergo, poor Billy is on the hook financially just like he was for his father's incompetence at breadwinning in the first film. They could have pre-empted Father of the Bride in mining that vein for humor.

(Hmm...between this and my thoughts on Christopher Lee, I'm thinking of a "how I would have done it.")

The Verdict

Maybe worth seeing if you're a Gremlins completist, especially since there's going to be an animated prequel series set in the 1920s in which a young Mr. Wing first encounters Gizmo. And make sure you rent it, don't buy it. 6.0 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Book Review: THE WOLFEN (1978)

Back when I was living in McDonough and working for The Griffin Daily News, I checked out from the library an ancient copy of Whitley Strieber's 1978 debut horror novel The Wolfen, which in 1981 was adapted into a questionable horror film featuring Edward James Olmos. This was either before The World According To Quinn or when the blog was in its infancy, so there was no review then.

Well that's about to change...

The left is the cover of the first edition, which I got from the library.

The cover of the Kindle book I now own is on the right.

The Plot

Two police officers are ambushed and killed by unknown attackers in a New York City junkyard in the late 1970s. Ambushed, killed, and at least partially eaten. The cranky old-school detective George Wilson and his female partner Becky Neff investigate and soon discover that the killings weren't the work of attack dogs, but something far worse. In New York, human beings are not at the top of the food chain, and the creatures that are don't take very kindly to the threat of their existence being exposed...

The Good

*The protagonists figure out very early on what they're dealing with and that they're being hunted. Yes, the antagonists of the story (I hesitate to call them "villains" because they're predatory animals acting according to their nature--they're not human beings who have chosen to do evil) are intelligent enough to recognize witnesses and try to eliminate them. And Neff and Wilson are smart enough to take precautions, so we get this gigantic cat-and-mouse game involving the titular monsters and two human detectives across late 1970s New York.

*There's a strong 1970s vibe to the book, which makes sense given when it was written. Neff is one of the few female police officers dealing with something as important and public as homicide and she has to deal with a skeptical partner and a generally skeptical police force. New York City is depicted as being a cesspool of decaying neighborhoods and crime, which it became in the 1970s. One character is a police officer on the take from a gambling syndicate, which was also an issue in the 1970s.

*Strieber's antagonists are one of the more creative horror monsters I've ever seen. They're not werewolves, although they're the origin of the werewolf legend. They're not a pack of conventional wolves that have adapted to city life the way coyotes have. They're an entirely new set of beings, and if they were real, they'd be incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

*And one character's visit to the library reveals a new horror--not only do werewolves have a factual basis, but so do vampires. A 100% human basis (unlike the werewolves), but an extremely creative and creepy one. This might come off to you like monster overload, but I promise you, it's not. It's really quite clever. The library visit also touches on how these creatures might adapt to various historical periods and how different human cultures would adapt to them. Strieber even touches on Native American culture (and possible awareness of the creatures), something that I suspect inspired the Native American cultural stuff that made it into the film version.

*The scenes from the monster's points-of-view are really well-done. No goofy infrared monster-vision here. It's poetic and fascinating.

*The book moves along pretty quickly. Like I said my in my review of The Flock that I wrote last Christmas-ish, it didn't take too many elliptical sessions to finish this. It's never boring.

*The book is legitimately creepy in many places. I'm fairly inured to movie/book scares, so if I thought this, you, dear reader, will probably be quite scared. The ending in particular gave me the chills.

The Bad

*There's a fair bit of telling and not showing in the book. Sometimes telling is necessary (as Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out in the podcast Writing Excuses with an Inigo Montoya quote from The Princess Bride, showing can take too long and sometimes a writer needs to sum up), but there could have been more showing. The places where telling could be replaced with superior showing seem most prominent in the beginning, but there are instances toward the end as well. To be fair, this is Strieber's first published novel, so I can be more forgiving.

*I would have liked more scenery description. In Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, we get a portrait of New York City at roughly the same time (or perhaps a little bit later) and the descriptions are much, much more vivid.

*A love triangle starts to come on partway through the book, and so somebody has to die. Strieber reveals some less-savory aspects of the man's character during the last third of the book to make his doom more palatable, stuff that I didn't think was adequately foreshadowed. He does have a pretty impressive death though.

The Verdict

A great debut novel of a writing who did a lot of good work in the horror field before focusing on a new interest in UFOs. Hopefully someday he'll come back. A sequel to The Wolfen describing what happens in the aftermath of the (literally) world-changing ending would be really interesting.

After all, I've heard the competition between humans and the cave bears for habitat in the face of the oncoming Ice Age described as mankind's first war, so some late 1970s/early 1980s equivalent involving the titular monsters would be a fun book to read.

9.0 out of 10.

Better Things for Mayor Bloomberg to Spend His Money On...

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, has announced his intention to spend $50 million to fund a "grassroots" effort to fight the National Rifle Association on the issue of expanding background checks for gun ownership.

Now, I'm a strong proponent of gun rights, but I do support universal background checks. I read a forum post someone wrote about how he went to a gun show and one of the sellers there did a background check using a laptop or some other kind of personal Internet connection, which shows it wouldn't be that much of an imposition. And rights do have responsibilities, like putting in the effort to make sure you're not selling to some gang-banger or toolbag with a history of domestic violence.

That being said, the article describes how previous efforts by Bloomberg to jump-start anti-gun movements with his money have failed before. Furthermore, Bloomberg is a polarizing figure who would give the NRA and other gun rights supporters a convenient boogeyman to scare the base with. To paraphrase George H.W. Bush (or his SNL parody), that might not be prudent at this juncture.

So here's an idea:

Bloomberg should instead dedicate some of that money to patronizing aspiring writers and artists, a category that would include me. There's a long traditional of well-off people supporting the arts with their money, including the Roman politician Gaius Maecenas who supported Virgil and Horace and various people listed here. Patronizing one hundred or one thousand such people would require much less money than this political project and would help ensure Mayor Bloomberg is remembered as something more than a politician.

In fact, here's something I can do with whatever money Mayor Bloomberg deigns to give me. Buy the book rights for the (New York-based I might add) band/comedy group The Lonely Island's song "I Run New York" and write a novel depicting him as this paladin fighting various evil forces emerging from holes in the space-time continuum in New York's subways and sewers. Given how he has recently been replaced, maybe it's about how he has to train the skeptical new mayor about how it's his sacred duty as the mayor of NYC to fight the horrors coming from underground...

For those of you not familiar with the song, here's a YouTube video:



Does Mayor Bloomberg like the idea of a novel (or series thereof) basically depicting him as Batman? If so, he or his people should get in touch with me.