Like some evil twin of its producer’s earlier film ET, this sharp and wacky 1984 kids’ horror movie makes fun of
American materialism and Christmastime commercialism
In 1984, Steven Spielberg produced this cheeky horror movie for kids, directed by Joe Dante and written by Chris Columbus – now on rerelease. It is a wacky, satirical spectacle of chaos. It consciously alludes to other films, such as It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz and Indiana Jones, and has characters watching Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck in To Please a Lady on TV. But on the unconscious level, or semi-conscious level, it surely alludes to Spielberg’s own ET. In fact, Gremlins is ET’s late-spawning evil twin.
Hoyt Axton plays Randall Peltzer, an inventor who lives in a sweet, Bedford Falls-type small town, one of whose local characters is an old drunk who rails against foreign automobiles and foreign things generally and claims that US planes in the second world war were sabotaged by evil alien sprites called “gremlins”. On one of Mr Peltzer’s sales trips in a far-off city, he stops by an exotically imagined Chinatown to buy a
Christmas present for his teenage son Billy (Zach Galligan); this turns out to be a mogwai, a sweet little bat-eared creature that everyone adores. But Billy breaks the rules about caring for the mogwai, and it is transformed into a horrifying Mr Hyde-type thing called a “gremlin”, which spawns other gremlins, and soon the town is in anarchy, culminating in an uproarious visual gag involving an old lady’s stairlift going haywire.