Critters (1986)

I had been unemployed for an extended period of time back in 1986. When I finally got a job and had a few paychecks under my belt, I wanted to be able to watch movies. I couldn't quite afford a VCR (that would come a few months later), but I did have cable TV. This was back when you paid one reasonable fee to have everything, rather than a bunch of smaller fees to not have everything.

We had The Movie Channel in our package, which for my money was better than HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime. Premiering on the night our cable was activated was Critters. You bet I was excited.

The truth is, I didn't like Critters all that much. I thought it was OK, but I wanted a movie with "chainsaw" or something in the title.

Did I know at the time that I was in a kind of Camelot? Yes, and no. I loved everything, but like all young fools I thought it all would last forever.

The movies, the books, the entire culture was perfect for me. The splatterpunk explosion was happening in horror fiction, and I was enraptured by it. Horror was in full bloom and was flourishing everywhere. Every week there was at least one new movie to salivate over. I was discovering writers like Joe R. Lansdale, Ray Garton, David J. Schow, and S.P. Somtow. Teen movies were still in vogue, and I liked them as much as I liked horror.

We had a thriving mall, one drive-in theater left, independent theaters, and I could buy Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine and Night Cry at WaldenBooks. I loved Fangoria, and a new mutant zine called Deep Red was available at a local comics shop.

I soon got my first VCR, a cheapshit Goldstar, and I was off and running.

Critters is a great signpost to that bygone era. No one can rightly call it a good movie, but Critters is a rollicking fun time.

The movie is an obvious bump-off of Gremlins and E.T. The Extraterrestrial. The entire production looks like it was trying hard to be an Amblin movie. Director Stephen Herek, who later had big success with the Bill and Ted movies, denies that Critters was a Gremlins ripoff, claiming that the first draft of the screenplay was written before Gremlins came out. Maybe so, but I'm pretty sure the resemblance to Joe Dante's movie helped Critters get the green light to production.

Critters has charming Dee Wallace as another loving mother, amiable Billy Green Bush as her husband, M. Emmet Walsh as a greasebag sheriff, and Scott Grimes as the quintessential eighties kid.

It's great to see the kids in the movie using homemade cassette tapes, and Grimes plays with firecrackers and a slingshot instead of soul-killing gadgets.

There are MTV-inspired rock segments, exceedingly cool creature effects courtesy of the Chiodo Brothers, cheesy space/alien footage, and a whole lot of very intended humor. Critters doesn't take itself seriously, and viewers shouldn't either. Let go of the handrails and have fun with it. Even horror-hating Siskel and Ebert gave the movie two thumbs up.

I like Critters more now than I did back in '86. I'm well aware of how I look back on those days with idealized nostalgia. They were special times. Why else do so many writers set their stories back then? Why was Stranger Things so popular? Why do the old movies continue to be re-released on Blu-ray and be remade and requalized again and again? It was a magic time and you can't convince me otherwise.

Written by Mark Sieber