Gremlins 2

Gremlins 2. Joe Dante. 1990.

This is a lot funnier than I remember! I sort of remember this as a horror movie. Or perhaps I’m misremembering.

I think I must be.

There’s a bunch of fun, goofy scenes here, and a huge number of incidental sight gags, but it doesn’t quite hang together. It’s very 80s, which I like: The plot starts off very slowly and sort of congeals. Or escalates. It feels Xmas-ey in the formless way the movie happens.

This sounds very stupid, but I hadn’t considered 80s American entertainment movies to have a specific aesthetic in this way: But they’re basically movies made by people who are nostalgic for the screwball comedies of the 40s and the monster movies of the 50s. It works beautifully, I think, but this sort of thing hasn’t been possible since.

So it’s a bit bewildering that there weren’t more sequels to this franchise, but perhaps time had just passed for this sort of thing.