This article brought to you by Top Producers Realty and Goodwin & Sons Market.
By Nathan Hurlbut
In the opening scene of “Gremlins” (1984) traveling salesman/inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) buys a unique pet for his son at a mysterious Chinese shop. Before taking little ‘Mogwai’ home, he is directly warned that there are three important things you have to remember: the little creature doesn’t like bright lights, you can’t get him wet, and, most importantly, whatever you do, don’t feed him after midnight.
Well, with an opening set-up of a movie like that, you know that at least one, and probably all three, of those rules are going to be broken over the course of the movie’s running time.
In the beginning of the film, director Joe Dante and screenwriter Chris Columbus take great pains to create an idyllic, wholesome Christmas environment. It’s immediately reminiscent of many other holiday movies, such as, for example, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), which actually plays on a kitchen television set at one point.
The filmmakers also shrewdly used the backlot of Universal Studios where so many other movies have been filmed to represent the film’s setting of Kingston Falls. It helps reinforces a nostalgic feeling of quintessential small town, USA, while its artificiality (complete with fake snow) suggests the filmmakers are parodying these very qualities at the same time.
Even the intentionally adorable character of Mogwai, (a name that literally translates from Cantonese as ‘demon’ in an ominous display of foreshadowing) is carefully designed to give you a serious case of the warm fuzzies.
All the better to eventually subvert once the plot cruises into its chaotic second act and the cute, little creatures invariably turn nasty. You could even be forgiven for forgetting that “Gremlins” is, in fact, a Christmas movie. The anarchy that breaks loose once these mean-spirited creatures are let loose is about as far removed from your typical holiday merriment as one could imagine.
Director Joe Dante clearly relishes the film’s chaotic turn of events when he is given free reign to indulge in these gremlins’ bad behavior. This is where the movie truly comes alive and becomes its most darkly comic. There’s the repulsive demises the first batch of creatures meet at the hands of various kitchen appliances, or also the surprisingly violent final showdown between Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) and Stripe, the leader of the evil gremlins. In either case, Dante is obviously taking great glee in letting these creatures wreak havoc over the town. You can easily imagine Walt Disney himself objecting to his “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” (1939) playing on the local movie screen as unruly gremlins hoot and holler from the packed seats of the theater.
Interestingly, Steven Spielberg, the producer of the film, was the one most responsible for reigning in the movie’s more horrifying elements, in an attempt to create a more ‘family-friendly’ movie and secure a PG rating. Ironically, it was both “Gremlins” and Spielberg’s own “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (released the same year) that convinced the MPAA ratings board to create an entirely new movie rating of ‘PG-13’ to appease parents who found film’s horrific elements a little too intense for younger children.
For those of us well past our childhood years, however, “Gremlins” provides a black comedy alternative to more typically sentimental holiday fare. It’s an entertaining blast of originality that is appropriate any time of the year.
“Gremlins” is playing for one night only Monday, April 1st at Village Theaters North in Big Bear.
