Critters (Stephen Herek, 1986)
The Blob meets Back to the Future meets Lilo and Stitch
Critters has often been dismissed as a Gremlins rip-off and while it’s hard not to see the obvious reasons for such a direct comparison, Critters isn’t simply replicating the formula of another recent success — it’s very much doing its own thing and as a result more than stands on its own merits.
Although the film’s primary setting is a rural town in Kansas — and mostly restricted to a small family farm there — the movie begins in outer space: some dangerous alien creatures escape their asteroid prison and flee to Earth, with a couple of shapeshifting bounty hunters in hot pursuit.
Sure enough, the Critters’ spaceship crash lands in a field on the Brown family’s farm, and they are quickly terrorized by the carnivorous creatures with extremely teethy mouths, that roll from victim to victim like lethal tumbleweeds and shoot poisonous darts from their backs like porcupine-snipers.
What follows is, essentially, a 1950’s sci-fi B-movie transposed to 1980’s middle America, which a healthy dose of PG-13 horror layered over the top.
That’s right folks: Critters is a PG-13 to Gremlins’ PG, meaning Critters is entitled to an F-bomb which is so exquisitely deployed that I was convinced this movie had a more adult rating when I watched it as a kid.
Alas, it is a kid-friendly horror movie, which means it is not truly horrific. Certainly, rewatching it now as an adult, it is not the scary film I remember thinking it was as pre-teen child. (But I was fairly inexperienced with horror films back then, and so I would have more easily bought into the film’s sense of peril and terror that the film, which is not to say the same is impossible today.)
There are some imaginative kills and good bouts of genuine horror. As the Critters eat more Earthlings, they grow in size — culminating in one of the film's best moments: when a giant Critter arm smashes into the bedroom in which the Browns have barricades themselves.
Did I mention what a stacked cast this movie has? Billy Green Bush (The Hitcher), Dee Wallace (E.T.), M. Emmet Walsh (Blood Simple), Billy Zane (Dead Calm)… And, of course, Broadway veteran Terrence Mann as one of the intergalactic bounty hunters, Ug (a.k.a. popstar Johnny Steele) — a role he would reprise in the each of the main Critters franchise’s three sequels.
Much of the pleasure of this film comes from the mashup of inspirations the film delights in sticking in a blender. Well-worn archetypes (the slow-footed sheriff, the town drunk crackpot, the dumb pretty boy from the city) are confronted with futuristic alien assassins who morph into a string of townsfolk in a wicked pastiche of Ed Wood for the Reagan era. It’s The Blob meets Back to the Future meets Lilo and Stitch.
I was also convinced watching it again after all these years that the salt-of-the-earth farmer father was going to make a solid hero befitting the nuclear family milieu. Imagine my surprise — and delight — then when it turns out to be the somewhat annoying younger brother. I imagine if I was a kid all over again, I would have loved that. And I would have loved this movie even more as a result.
Make no mistake, Critters is a fun and adequate family-friendly horror movie. While it can absolutely be enjoyed by adults, this one is targeted squarely at kids. So show it to yours. I have no doubt they’d get a kick out of it.