Joe Dante‘s (semi) child friendly variation on the Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde story is a festive masterpiece that oozes wit, charm, viscera and the balls to do something different with the mainstream Christmas movie.
Decidedly anti Christmas, the film takes in a skin flint cop who won’t pay out for a Christmas tree, a modern day Mrs Scrooge who threatens to do bad things to dogs and Judge Reinhold as a proto yuppie bank employee. Even VTSS favourite Glynn Turman (see JD’s Revenge) – as a seemingly mild mannered Science teacher at the local school, is morally bankrupt, prodding at furry creatures trapped in cages for examination and experimentation. Cutey Pie Phoebe Cates lacks the Christmas spirit, haunted as she is, by suicide, and everything is wickedly juxtaposed with Phil Spector’s festive Wall of Sound, the Christmas classic “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and Jerry Goldsmith‘s wonderfully impish OST.
Chris Columbus‘ script underlines the cynical tone at play. Billy Peltzer’s inventor father fills his house with gadgetry that doesn’t work, microwave ovens are used for less than wholesome purposes and a malfunctioning Stannah Stairlift provides one of the stand out moments in which machinery goes wrong – an idea that refers to the Second World War origins of the Gremlin myth which is, in turn, alluded to explicitly in the film early on…
Notionally, Dante’s film also nods heavily towards Dan O Bannon‘s treatment of the Alien screenplay and there are notable similarities between the two – the simple premise, a race against time, the incomprehensible struggle and the physiological horror of the creature and its polymorphism. Most explicitly of course, there is the horrific mutations in which the super cute proto Furby Mogwai become greasy lizard like Gremlins…
Surprisingly violent, even by today’s standards, for what is essentially a kids film, Gremlins nonetheless takes the popular high concept approach of the monster movie during the 80s and wraps high voltage fairy lights around it to successfully dazzle and entertain. A genuine classic.
