There’s no character in Joe Dante’s Gremlins more beloved than Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton), a struggling inventor from small-town Kingston Falls who travels the country bearing a great sales pitch (“I make the illogical logical”) and a bunch of products that keep backfiring on him.
Yet when Randall comes home for Christmas, he’s greeted to a hero’s welcome from his son, Billy (Zach Galligan), and his wife, Lynn (Frances Lee McCain), who laments that her husband’s inventions only work well for a couple of weeks, but never seems disappointed by him.
It takes absolutely no time at all for Billy and the family to violate all those rules, which result in the mogwai first multiplying into mischievous clones and then cocooning like the xenomorphs in Alien, later emerging as scaly, malevolent beasts hellbent on destruction.
A sequence like Lynn fighting off a gremlin assault in her kitchen with a knife, various Peltzer appliances and a microwave is shot like a straight-up horror movie, but is hilariously gooey fun, a gateway for kids to experience what it’s like to be shocked into cathartic laughter.
Other scares are owed mostly to Dante’s skill as a film-maker, like a science teacher who tries to assuage a hiding gremlin with a candy bar and nearly loses an arm, or that awful Mrs Deagle getting catapulted out of her second-story window.
The film leaves the audiences with warnings about the follies of man (“You do with mogwai what your society has done with all of nature’s gifts,” scolds its elderly Chinese keeper) and the “gremlins” that create havoc in our machines and other parts of our life.
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