So there I was, looking for something different after watching Get Carter. What would make a good follow-up to a movie where an unpleasant antihero got violent retribution for the death of his brother? That movie had such a serious tone with a serious lead actor playing the main role, that a follow-up should be everything that Get Carter was theoretically not. It should be broad, silly, and probably a B-movie of some kind, and something else I could knock off one of my long watchlists.
Naturally, I went with Critters. I don’t think you can get much more removed from Get Carter than that.
A group of eight Krites escaped from an alien prison of some kind, and the warden dispatches two shapeshifting bounty hunters to take care of them. Said bounty hunters will take a form like that of the local species and hunt down the eight and bring them in. The Krites landed on Earth. They’re small, at first, roll around like high speed tumbleweeds, and will eat anything that they can fit into their mouths. They land in Kansas near a small family farm where the Browns live. Helen and Jay are the parents to teenage daughter April and preteen son Brad. And if the Krites get to them, well, there won’t be much left of anyone. Krites tend to eat things very quickly.
As far as the movie goes, though it acts like some sort of cross between E.T. and Gremlins, right up to the point of casting the former’s Dee Wallace as Helen Brown and letting a Krite eat an E.T. doll, it’s not a movie that takes itself very seriously. The bounty hunters are ridiculous. One takes the form of the most popular rocker on the planet while the other, more trigger happy of the two changes faces rather regularly. Despite the Krites/Critters appearance, there aren’t a lot of people killed during the course of the movie. They eat a cow, a cop played by future Star Trek Voyager cast member Ethan Phillips, and then later April’s boyfriend played by a young Billy Zane. They can’t even manage to catch the Brown’s family cat. Young Brad, along with the Brown’s paranoid alcoholic farmhand, are the movie’s real heroes, and the Critters themselves are hardly indestructible. It is a very silly movie.
Which is not to say it is an altogether good one. The sense of humor is fine, the Critter puppets probably not too bad by 1980s standards, and everyone involved seems to know what kind of movie this is. But at the same time, it didn’t really grab me one way or the other. It was fine, but nothing earthshattering. Perhaps that was because Gremlins did it better first, but of the Gremlins knock-offs, I suspect this was one of the better and more memorable ones. The Critters themselves are a fairly unique-looking thing, with their poison spines, large mouths, and furry beachball style forms of locomotion.
As such, this is more it is less my cup of tea than to say to avoid it at all costs. Then again, I do wonder how much more I would have liked a movie like this or any number of other movies I have seen in the past two years if I had seen them when they were new and I was much younger and, admittedly, a lot less picky.
Grade: C+
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