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.

Reet, Petite, and Gone. William Forest Crouch. 1947.

This, uses, the, Oxford, comma. Which is quite unusual in titles. I means, most of them don’t use commas at all.

Anyway, this is one of them there very low budget movies that has a nonsensical kinda-plot in between a lot of musical performances: It’s like the MTV of its time. It’s amateurishly shot: whenever there’s two people talking (and there’s a lot of those scenes) you can never see both of their faces, for instance.

The director has a pretty odd CV:

It’s a super-long list of shorts from the 40s, and looking at the list of performers in each, I’m guessing that they’re all basically music videos.

So this is one of the two featureish-length movies he made, and it shows.

I bailed on this movie after twenty-five minutes.

Gremlins. Joe Dante. 1984.

My stash of unseen movies was getting low (just 150) so I started looking around for more more more stuff to watch. And I thought: “Hm! What about those cool American Gothic movies of the 80s? Kathryn Bigelow and the Coen brothers and stuff…”

So after buying those, Amazon recommended buying Gremlins, and that’s why I’m watching Gremlins.

Again, because I’ve probably watched it at least a couple of times before. But back in the 80s. I remember really loving this, but being scared shitless watching it when I was like sixteen. Or am I thinking of a different movie?

[time passes]

OK, I’m fifteen minutes in, and this is so much goofier than I remember. It’s basically a 30s pastiche? These characters are straight out of a Capra movie! I love it!

[time passes]

At 45 minutes in I’m kinda bored. I mean… not totally bored, but things are just kinda sloppy. There’s a lot of fun scenes, but it’s like we’re waiting for the movie to begin. But even so, it has nerve.

[more time passes]

The nerve kind of went away, and now it’s kinda lame. I mean, the bar scene is fun, but it’s so weird with all the wintery outdoors scenes shot on a studio lot. One disturbing thing about all these shenanigans is that the evil Gremlins seem like they have human-level intelligence (i.e. kinda dumb but fun), but still killing them is all fun and games?

There’s one black character, and he’s killed off early (which is typical). What’s more unusual is that the female characters are pretty kick ass.

And also… I thought this took pace in a skyscraper? Is that the second movie? Is that the scary one?