Saw Gremlins 2, which was a small personal victory because I was taken to see this film when I was very young. I had to be removed from the theater during the scene were the woman is trapped in the elevator and being grabbed at by many leathery arms. Not, I think, for children.
The film references Chuck Jones cartoons many times, but whereas Chuck Jones is bright and nonthreatening, whereas this is dark, ugly, realistic 80s-style sarcastic humor where the cute thing gets beat up and isn't that funny? The gremlins are mocking caricatures of the human archetypes: the nymphomaniac, the sports fan, the bar fly, the intellectual. They are all screaming, and ugly, and froglike, smoking and wearing sunglasses indoors. Just repulsive.
The film is fairly nuts. There's the famous scene with the Hulkster threatening the gremlins into continuing the film, and many other moments where I was really surprised by what I was seeing. I didn't get really caught up by the film because it is fundamentally mean-spirited, but it's definitely a trip. This film is deeply cynical about human attitudes, with the gremlins mocking and skewering everything in a broad, dumb way. It's fairly fun, but it's like getting drunk: you kind of feel dirty afterwards.
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