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Gremlins Parent Guide

Obey the rules or suffer the consequences..

When Billy Peltzer (Zac Galligan) neglects the care instructions for his new fluffy pet Gizmo, the cute creature morphs into a million little monsters capable of murder and mayhem.

Release date June 8, 1984

Run Time: 106 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kerry bennett.

To be truthful, all I remember about Gremlins are the fuzzy, pointy-eared stuffed toys that showed up on store shelves after the 1984 movie released. I never got around to seeing the movie—until now.

Thirty years later the hairstyles and special effects look dated but the script remains an interesting mix of horror and comedy. In the story, Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) works as a bank teller and lives at home with his parents. Just before Christmas his father Randall (Hoyt Axton) comes home with an unusual gift he picked up at a Chinese curiosity shop. It’s a little furry critter that Billy’s dad has named Gizmo.

The reason why Gizmo should have avoided water becomes abundantly clear after contact suddenly causes him to spawn a host of offspring known as gremlins—ugly, tiny, green monsters that begin to terrorize the town.

This PG rated movie may seem like a family friendly option, however parents should be aware that Gremlins came out before the PG-13 rating was instituted. Along with some mild sexual innuendo and a handful of profanities, the film contains some gory and violent depictions that would likely push it solidly into higher category, were it to be re-rated today.

When Billy’s mom discovers gremlins ransacking her kitchen, she turns on the blender with a creature inside. Green slime splatters everywhere. Another gets cooked in the microwave. Again, green slime splatters everywhere. In the midst of the ensuing mayhem, a character is beheaded with a sword, a woman is killed after being catapulted out of her window, cars crash and an explosion in a movie theater kills every one inside the building. The miniature monsters also bite, scratch and stab a man with a needle. And, in what may be one of the most disturbing scenes for young viewers, the leader of the gremlins melts into icky goo.

While the comedy in the movie helps lighten the script (and likely contributed to the movie’s success), some of the horror scenes are truly scary and gruesome. One character even talks about a man who was caught in a house chimney, decaying for several days before anyone found his body.

So although Gremlins finds it’s way onto Christmas movie lists—thanks in part to the holiday season the story is set in—bringing these cruel creatures home for your little ones might not turn out to be the ideal gift.

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Kerry Bennett

Gremlins rating & content info.

Why is Gremlins rated PG? Gremlins is rated PG by the MPAA

Violence: Gremlins terrorize the town causing car accidents, stabbing a man with a needle, destroying homes and property with a bulldozer, chasing characters with a chainsaw and killing a woman by catapulting her out of a second storey window. Gremlins are killed in a blender, a microwave, and an explosion at a movie theater. One is decapitated with a sword. Another has its skin eaten away, exposing its skeleton, before it melts into the ground. The film contains numerous jump scenes. An animal’s beating heart is shown in a science film. A character talks about a man that was found decaying in a house chimney.

Sexual Content: Some mild sexual innuendo is included. A gremlin appears to flash a woman.

Language: The script contains infrequent mild and moderate profanities.

Alcohol / Drug Use :Several characters smoke or drink. Some characters are depicted as drunk.

Page last updated July 17, 2017

Gremlins Parents' Guide

Does the combination of comedy and horror work in this film? Does it work as well 30 years later as it did when the movie originally released?

The Chinese shop owner said that people are not ready to own one of these unusual little creatures. What other examples of things can you think of that people may not be ready to use or care for wisely?

The most recent home video release of Gremlins movie is December 9, 2014. Here are some details…

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"Gremlins" is a confrontation between Norman Rockwell's vision of Christmas and Hollywood's vision of the blood-sucking monkeys of voodoo island. It's fun. On the one hand, you have an idyllic American small town, with Burger Kings and Sears stores clustered merrily around the village square, and on the other hand you have a plague of reprehensible little beasties who behave like a rodent road company of Marlon Brando's motorcycle gang in "The Wild One."

The whole movie is a sly series of send-ups, inspired by movie scenes so basic they reside permanently in our subconscious. The opening scene, for example, involves a visit to your basic Mysterious Little Shop in Chinatown, where, as we all know, the ordinary rules of the visible universe cease to operate and magic is a reality. Later on, after a kid's father buys him a cute little gremlin in Chinatown, we have a new version of your basic Puppy for Christmas Scene. Then there are such basic movie characters as the Zany Inventor, the Blustering Sheriff, the Clean-Cut Kid, the Cute Girlfriend, and, of course, the Old Bag.

The first half of the movie is the best. That's when we meet the little gremlins, which are unbearably cute and look like a cross between a Pekingese, Yoda from " The Empire Strikes Back ," the Ewoks from " Return of the Jedi ," and kittens. They have impossibly big eyes, they're cuddly and friendly, and they would make ideal pets except for the fact that they hate bright lights, should not be allowed to get wet, and must never be fed after midnight. Well, of course, it's always after midnight; that's the tip-off that this isn't a retread of " E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial " but comes from an older tradition, the fairy tale or magic story. And in the second half of the movie, after the gremlins have gotten wet, been fed after midnight, etc., they turn into truly hateful creatures that look like the monster in " Alien ."

The movie exploits every trick in the monster-movie book. We have scenes where monsters pop up in the foreground, and others where they stalk us in the background, and others when they drop into the frame and scare the Shinola out of everybody. And the movie itself turns nasty, especially in a scene involving a monster that gets slammed in a microwave oven, and another one where a wide-eyed teenage girl ( Phoebe Cates ) explains why she hates Christmas. Her story is in the great tradition of 1950s sick jokes, and as for the microwave scene, I had a queasy feeling that before long we'd be reading newspaper stories about kids who went home and tried the same thing with the family cat.

"Gremlins" was hailed as another "E.T." It's not. It's in a different tradition. At the level of Serious Film Criticism, it's a meditation on the myths in our movies: Christmas, families, monsters, retail stores, movies, boogeymen. At the level of Pop Movie-going, it's a sophisticated, witty B movie, in which the monsters are devouring not only the defenseless town, but decades of defenseless clichés. But don't go if you still believe in Santa Claus.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

Gremlins (1984)

106 minutes

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Gremlins Reviews

Joe Dante’s super little film... is a salute to American studio backlot filmmaking as well as a galloping gust of monster id/

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 11, 2023

A seasonal classic for good reason, its family-friendly frights successfully blend together humor and horror for an alternative to more traditional holiday viewings.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2023

Joe Dante delves into the cute and the cuddly and finds the evil green monsters hiding inside in [this] mix of Christmas comedy, monster movie, and very, very naughty children.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2022

While some of the lines feel a bit dated, overall the movie has aged well, and it has the same fun, over-the-top energy that made it such a big hit in 1984.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2022

With its unique far-out quality, Gremlins is best described as The Evil Dead for kids.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2022

...this 'gift of the mogwai' continually ups the ante in terms of the cartoonish action...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 24, 2021

The foremost pleasure of Gremlins (and the crux of its marketing) is the sight of those little monsters wreaking havoc... There's more to it, though: Gremlins is a movie we feel good about watching because we're proud of the characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 23, 2021

A great family friendly holiday horror movie

Full Review | Dec 14, 2021

...a genuine classic that holds up remarkably well all these years later.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 3, 2020

A thrilling anti-Christmas product, effectively mocking other no-nonsense evil alien endeavors to become a staple of the horror comedy subgenre.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 6, 2020

GREMLINS is definitely a product of its time, but it's got a lot of heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jun 22, 2020

Joe Dante's Gremlins quickly fixes itself as a rare Christmas horror movie classic

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 24, 2020

A film that knows how to masterfully combine terror with humor, family spirit and countless winks to moviegoers, without ever spoiling the mix. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 8, 2020

Unlike the fabrication of the gremlins, the rest of the movie, with its terrible first part, is clumsier. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Feb 20, 2020

As a black comedy, a satirical look at consumerism, and a movie bursting with Christmas cheer, no matter the descriptor- Joe Dante's Gremlins is a classic.

Full Review | Feb 6, 2020

Benefits from one of the most underappreciated musical scores of the 1980s.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2019

It is a wacky, satirical spectacle of chaos.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2019

The visual effects are imaginative, yet the jokey tone too often throws the entire film off.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 5, 2019

If you grew up in the '80's and remember a simpler time without cell phones or you want to introduce your kids to the "magic" of 1980's films then Gremlins is a great place to start.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 30, 2019

The film showcases Dante's two cinematic loves: 1950's era sci-fi/horror and The Looney Tunes. The two forms merge together to create a cautionary tale of Christmas gifts gone awry.

Full Review | Dec 21, 2017

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‘Gremlins’ (1984) Review

By The New York Times

Dec. 11, 2018

Many of the holiday movies we consider classics or cult favorites today did not seem destined for such glory when we first reviewed them. Some we panned. Others were flops. Others just weren’t particularly holiday-focused.

We dug up 10 of those reviews from our archives, which we’ve rounded up here, along with info on where to stream them. Below is how the critic Vincent Canby reviewed “Gremlins” for The New York Times on June 8, 1984 :

THE star of “Gremlins” is none of the perfectly adequate actors in the cast but the mogwai, a small, furry, fictitious creature that looks something like a cuddly teddy bear with the ears of a rabbit, a Bambilike nose, eyes as round and deep and dark as glass buttons, a sweet disposition and a physical nature more unstable than hydrogen gas.

[ Read about 9 more classic and cult Christmas movies as The Times first reviewed them. ]

At the beginning of the film, when Rand Peltzer, an unsuccessful inventor, buys a mogwai in San Francisco’s Chinatown as a Christmas present for his family, he is warned to keep the creature away from direct light, never to allow it to have contact with water and, above all, never feed it after midnight. Bluebeard’s instructions to his foolish wives couldn’t have been any more specific.

Rand returns home to Kingston Falls, U.S.A., a perfect movie set of a town, where the plastic snow never melts and where, you can be sure, they start playing Christmas carols the day after the Fourth of July. In this comically idealized setting, it’s just a matter of time before each of the mogwai prohibitions has been broken, with grotesque results that nearly destroy Kingston Falls as well as the movie.

“Gremlins,” which opens today at the Warner and other theaters, was produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Joe Dante, who was responsible for “It’s a Good Life,” one of the better episodes in “Twilight Zone - the Movie.” This is pretty much the same relationship that Mr. Spielberg, usually a director (“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”), had to “Poltergeist,” the classic spook movie he produced with Tobe Hooper as director.

“Gremlins,” however, has a very different character, being a wiseacre mixture of movie-buff jokes, movie genres and movie sensibilities. It’s as schizoid as the mogwai, which, having been fed after midnight, suddenly reproduces itself, but not in its own sweet, cuddly image, but as dozens of small, demonic creatures - the gremlins of the title.

These second-generation mogwais, which look like the imps of Hieronymous Bosch, are at first funny, having as their only goal the pursuit of mindless mischief. They’re neither good nor bad, just self-absorbed. Then, however, they turn seriously mean. At which point “Gremlins” explodes in an orgy of special effects, which should scare the wits out of very small children for whom, I assume, the movie was made.

Both Mr. Dante and Chris Columbus, who wrote the screenplay, have antic senses of humor, but they are unreliable. They attack their young audience as mercilessly as the creatures attack the characters. One minute they’re fondly recalling Frank Capra’s sentimental classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the next minute they’re subjecting this Capraesque Smalltown, U.S.A., to a devastation that makes the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” look benign.

I’ve no idea how children will react to the sight of a Kingston Falls mom, carving knife in hand, decapitating one gremlin and shoving another into the food processor, head first. Will they laugh when Billy Peltzer, the film’s idealized, intentionally dopey, 20-year-old hero, is threatened by a gremlin with a chainsaw and then stabbed by a gremlin with a spear gun? Will they cheer when Billy blows up the Kingston Falls movie theater, where the gremlins, now resembling an average kiddie matinee crowd, are exuberantly responding to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”?

“Gremlins” is far more interested in showing off its knowledge of movie lore and making random jokes than in providing consistent entertainment.

Unfortunately, it’s funniest when being most nasty. The high point of the film comes when Kate, Billy’s pretty girlfriend, admits why she hates Christmas. It seems that when she was a child, her dad disappeared on Christmas Eve, only to be discovered some days later, decomposing, halfway down the chimmney in his Santa Claus suit.

“That,” says Kate, “is how I found out there is no Santa Claus.”

“Gremlins” takes a fairly jokey view of all its characters, including Kingston Falls’s own wicked witch, a wealthy, ferociously mean-spirited woman - nicely played by television’s Polly Holliday - who refers to an impoverished widow’s two small children as “deadbeats.”

None of the other actors, including Hoyt Axton (Rand Peltzer), Zach Galligan (Billy) and Phoebe Cates (Kate) has a chance against the mogwai and the gremlins, made by Chris Walas. These mechanical animals aren’t very lovable, but they are cleverly devised, and one knows where one stands with them.

Rent it on Amazon , iTunes , Google Play , Vudu and YouTube .

“Gremlins,” which has been rated PG (“Parental Guidance Suggested”), may not be ideal entertainment for younger children for the reasons described above. Running time: 105 minutes.

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Don’t feed after midnight … Gremlins (1984), directed by Joe Dante.

Gremlins review – Spielbergian satire still has bite

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

I n 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 spawns horrifying Mr Hyde-type things called “gremlins”, and soon the town is in anarchy, culminating in an uproarious visual gag involving an old lady’s stairlift going haywire.

Gremlins makes fun of America’s materialism, its suspicion of foreigners, and its ironic reliance on foreign-made toys and gadgets at Christmas and any other time. There are also some very sharp lines. Billy’s girlfriend Kate (Phoebe Cates) hates Christmas with a passion and sympathises with other Christmas refuseniks: “While everyone else is opening their presents, they’re opening their wrists!” The reason for this is that her dad suffered a bizarre Christmas-related death.

There is another very adult line that never ceases to startle. When a little kid is shown how a gremlin is undergoing a transformation, he is told: “He’s going through change”; “Like my mother”; “No, this is different.” If Gremlins were to be made today, I don’t think its outrageously orientalist fantasy of Chinatown, with the aged Chinese grandpa with the long hair, spindly moustache and blind eye, would get past the script stage. The gremlins nonetheless deliver quite a bite.

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Script to Screen – How Gremlins Became the Ultimate Family Horror Movie

Gremlins - Holiday Horror - First Draft Scripts That Should Be Adapted After Final Destination

Gremlins is widely regarded as one of the most beloved horror-tinged family films of all time. It’s a fun, exciting adventure movie as well as a holiday classic. Of course, it has its suspenseful moments and is focused on a horde of devilish, little monsters but the main goal of it is for the audience to have fun. It’s a feature about recapturing the feel of a Norman Rockwell painting. It portrays picturesque 1950’s Americana in the 1980’s, and comments on things like commercialism and our society’s over-dependence on technology.

The gremlins themselves can be unnerving to a child, but even in monstrous form they have a strong sense of humor. They’re the antiheroes of the movie, given much more screen time than a creature is usually granted in this kind of monster epic. The feature goes out of its way to show the gremlins laughing and having fun as much as it shows them attacking people because the people behind it—particularly Stephen Spielberg—did not want any risk of children being afraid of what they were seeing on the screen. There may be some dark bits in the finished product, but many of them seem almost accidental.

Originally, however, things were going to be very different. The original script by Chris Columbus is almost the complete opposite of what wound up on the screen, especially in terms of tonality. The film was originally written as a straightforward horror movie. It started out the same, with Billy getting the mogwai as a present. But the script saw more large-scale destruction of the town itself and a much higher body count. In this version, both Billy’s dog and his mother were killed.

Mrs. Peltzer’s showdown with the gremlins in the kitchen went much worse for her in the original draft of the screenplay. Like the finished movie, Billy realizes that his mother is alone in the house with the little monsters and rushes home to save her. But originally, he was supposed to find his mother’s severed head bouncing down the stairs.

The biggest change of all, though, came in the form of the movie’s two primary little characters: Gizmo, the furry hero and Stripe, the menacing gremlin leader. In Columbus’ first script these two were the same character. There essentially was no Gizmo. There was just one character, named Mogwai, that starts out furry and cute and then becomes the terrifying leader of the Gremlins.

These nasty scaly gremlins emerge from the back of the Mogwai Gizmo.

While it was Spielberg’s people who optioned the script, the legendary director didn’t become too involved with the film until after Dante came onboard. Once Spielberg began to take a more hands-on role, Gremlins began to change. One of the first things Spielberg wanted to scrap was the idea of the cuddly pet becoming the monster.

He wanted a creature that audiences would not only enjoy, but would adore. He wanted them to create a monster so cute that people would wear it on T-shirts and pillows and hang it on their car windows with little suction cups. Spielberg wanted a merchandising icon and so Gizmo was born.

Two Gremlins watching a movie in 3D in Joe Dante's horror picture Gremlins.

Ultimately, things probably worked out for the best. Steven Spielberg knows how to appeal to the widest possible audience more than virtually any other living filmmaker. He made changes to make the movie more successful and it worked. Gremlins was a huge commercial success. It also gave Joe Dante more opportunities as a director.

He had a major mainstream blockbuster under his belt and was able to direct a wider range of features than Piranha and The Howling had offered him. He may never have been able to make movies like The ‘Burbs or Matinee if it hadn’t been for Gremlins. Still, it’s fun to think about the picture that could have been. A dark, haunting little creature feature about the destruction of small-town America. But that kind of thing isn’t terribly accessible, and Gremlins definitely is.

This film was transformed during its production; it went through a complete metamorphosis. It is almost the reverse of the creature transformations in the movie. Instead of going from something cute and cuddly to something dark and ugly, it went from something dark and ugly to something cute and cuddly. In doing so, it became a quintessential family horror and has been cherished ever since.

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Gremlins (1984), Lookback/Review

Yes, Gremlins is a Christmas movie. Albeit the Christmas movie that forced Steven Spielberg to advocate for the creation of a PG-13 rating.

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How can a high-maintenance pet turn into an uncontrollable yuletide terror by just adding water? Forget it, Billy, it’s Chinatown.

***CONTAINS MOVIE SPOILERS***

The historical identification of Christmas as a time of family togetherness and traditional values is apparent (perhaps oppressively so) in every holiday movie from Hollywood’s Golden Age. As we all know, though, since that time the season has increasingly become associated with depression, disaster and general despair, as is evident from National Lampoon’s holiday hijinx on forward. Joe Dante’s 1984 Gremlins is one Christmas classic that addresses the holidays the hard way; as likable lead Billy Peltzer tries to court his prospective paramour Kate with seasonal cheer, she shoots him down with a shout out to the seasonal affective disorder set: “While everyone else is opening up their presents, they’re opening up their wrists.” As if in response to her ominous outburst, when an unusual creature breaches the young would-be lovers’ town borders, they’re in for a world of holiday horror.

The all-American Gremlins opens on a riskily florid portrayal of Chinatown, where we meet Randall Peltzer (country and western singer-songwriter Hoyt Axton, who coincidentally composed the Christmas classic Joy to the World ), a traveling salesman whose devotion to disseminating his own barely-functional inventions has taken him from Small Town USA to Chinatown NYC, too dangerously close to Christmas for his family’s liking. Hoping to pedal his dysfunctional wares in “some little junk store” of an astoundingly mystical nature, Rand finds himself face to furry face with an animal he’s never seen before – and the perfect gift for his son Billy.

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Back in Kingston Falls, “USA” (just so we all relate), Billy Peltzer (affably nerdy Zack Galligan) battles the economic depression and assault on historic landmarks in his small town from behind the counter of the local bank, where his beautiful best friend Kate (Pheobe Cates, providing the expected overdose of charm) also toils; the two twenty-somethings are still living with their respective parents to protect their clans from poverty. If the sleepy dignity of Kingston Falls resembles closely George Bailey’s town of Bedford Falls, it’s probably no coincidence; It’s a Wonderful Life is only one of a horde of films playing on TVs and movie screens almost continuously throughout the duration of Gremlins , whose movie references range from clips of the aforementioned Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic and Invasion of the Body Snatchers , to visual gags about everything from film noir to Flashdance , to cameos by entertainment icons from Chuck Jones to Robbie the Robot. Although these are the trappings of an exercise in ironic meta-ness (and this is hardly out of the question, what with the carnage including the monsters tearing through movie screens and taking over TV sets) Gremlins seems to employ these things to create an atmosphere of nostalgia and to evoke a past that ought to remain uncorrupted. However, when Billy Peltzer’s Pop comes home from his tour of duty with his ambitious update on the family dog, he finds out that his own innocent disposition is a double-aged sword.

The Peltzers’ house is dominated by Rand’s hare-brained inventions: a bathroom in Swiss Army format; a cannibalistic chicken-shaped egg cracker; an electric artichoke; and a violently unpredictable juicer. But the novelty of his innovations is about to disappear in the face of the family’s newest addition, the irresistible (and eminently toyetic) “Gizmo.” The Peltzers, along with the greater citizenry of Kingston Falls, offer the creature, heretofore unknown even to popular mythology, a bizarrely faithful welcome into their world. Inevitably each new person it meets asks “What is it?;” yet “It’s a mogwai ” is, for whatever reason, all the information anyone needs. Even one extra question might have uncovered the Cantonese meaning of the name, which is, roughly, “demon.” But maybe further investigation seems so unnecessary because it is so adorable . Billy’s new seemingly mammalian, genderless, bipedal pet comes with an important set of instructions: keep it away from bright lights which will kill it; don’t get it wet; and no matter how much it cries, no matter how much it begs, never, ever feed it after midnight. Little explanation is provided for the rules that the mogwai does not share with vampires. But in all fairness, it is probably much easier to accept a secret allergic-to-water animal previously unclassified by science that somehow lives its life on a planet covered by 71% by water and inhabited entirely by water-based and water-dependent organisms, when said animal has giant floppy ears, huge doe eyes and a little flaring button nose couched in a teddy bear-like body of fluffy brown and white fur (all courtesy the overwhelming talent of monster-maker Chris Walas, of The Fly and Naked Lunch fame). It speaks rudimentary English (with the aid of Howie Mandel and various vocal talents), converses in Chinese, doesn’t need baths, sings with perfect pitch (thanks in part to Jerry Goldsmith’s unforgettable music for the film) and delights everyone who meets it. What could possibly go wrong??

The same naiveté that Kingston Falls’ populace (including a host of familiar faces from Corey Feldman to Judge Reinhold) shows in their unquestioning acceptance of the mysterious mogwai causes their insufficient concern regarding its care. Being that the film does in fact take place on the planet Earth, Gizmo comes in contact with water sooner rather than later and undergoes an apparently painful and alarmingly revolting asexual reproductive process, with spherical proto-mogwai popping off of its body and expanding into new ones. Now that Billy has a litter of pups in a box that a more cynical farmer would know what to do with, he finally begins to become curious about the nature of the little beasts and takes one down to the only authority of which he seems to be aware; the unphased high school science teacher, who keeps the mogwai overnight to “run some tests.” Billy’s burgeoning responsibility emerges too late in the game, though, and the movie takes a turn from cartoonishly cutesy to the gruesome frightfest one might expect from the director of the original Piranha . As the mogwai multiply beyond control and take up residence in a variety of locations across town, it becomes impossible to monitor their after-midnight food intake and after emerging from a foul, slimy “pupal stage” the mogwai are both many and monstrous.

Though she has relatively little screen time, Frances Lee McCain as Billy’s mom Lynn Peltzer easily joins the ranks of scream queens Jaime Lee Curtis and Adrienne Barbeau in a spectacular scene of domestic carnage that made the case for a beleaguered producer Spielberg to advocate for the creation of the PG-13 rating to appease hordes of outraged parents. The PG-rated Gremlins has an on-screen human body count of no more than three (not including a few more ambiguously fatal attacks), which passes with very little bloodshed; however, the more general gremlin-related carnage, which ranges from mass consumption of unpaid-for candy to vehicular manslaughter and rending flesh with razor-like claws, is outdone easily by the severity of the violence against the gremlins. After having received a distress call from her son at the newly infested high school, Lynn discovers a nest of recently ruptured, phosphorescent Alien -like eggs from which the mogwai have emerged post-midnight snacking. What they have become is the substantially less sympathetic, lanky, lizard-like gremlins, who promptly embark on a chaotic rampage, beginning with the Peltzer family home. Lucky for Lynn, the shock of this discovery leaves her maternal instincts intact and Mama Peltzer makes her own metamorphosis into a blade-wielding badass, ridding her home of the monsters in a whirlwind of intense ultraviolence. Throughout the film, the monsters are stabbed, blended, blown up in a microwave, burned and bombed, often with attendant geysers of green gue that come as a shock in what has heretofore appeared to be a fairly gentle children’s movie.

Gremlins is the second collaboration between Joe Dante and Stephen Spielberg following their work together on the anthologic The Twilight Zone: The Movie , and one wonders if the two creators weren’t inspired by contributing director George Miller’s update of the episode in which William Shatner is terrorized by a gremlin on the wing of his airplane. In accord with the air of nostalgia cast over Gremlins , the very idea of the creature dates back at least to World War II as a particularly fanciful expression of our fear of the Kremlin. In the present film, the audience is reminded of this mythology by the lovable town lush, a doomed Dick Miller (instantly-recognizable and beloved genre staple who has appeared in everything from The Terminator to Pulp Fiction ), whose paranoia about invading foreign gremlins enables him to name the vicious creatures on sight as the town takeover begins. Joe Dante’s version of the myth, wherein the invasion is abetted by the seduction of the mogwai, is much more dangerous than a standard monster attack, as Billy, Kate and the unmorphed Gizmo discover when grappling with Kingston Falls’ Keystone-like cops (including a young and fully-coifed Jonathan Banks, of Breaking Bad fame) and becoming a meager force for homeland security.

Although the lethal light of day finally pours in over the last stronghold of the devastated gremlin ranks with results that should please the most seasoned gorehound, the chaos has been so extreme that Christmas is still cancelled and the Peltzers learn a much-needed lesson about responsibility, with the only consolation prize being a promising goodbye from Gizmo to Billy, with an implied “just for now” from the Chinatown shopkeep who comes to repo the mogwai. Kate’s downer disposition has been validated in prodigious proportions by the Peltzer family’s mistakes, but can this intimate ordeal translate into a Dickensian life lesson for the world at large? Only Gremlins II will tell . . .

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Claire Donner

Claire Donner graduated from Bard College with a degree in Art History and has since imported that solemn, stiff upper-lipped sensibility to writing and research for…

Watching Gremlins as a Kid Prepared Me for a Life of Loving Movies

While a lot of people mistake Gremlins for a light horror-comedy or even a family film, it is a straight-up horror movie.
The movie prepared me for various genres, from romance to zombie films, with its diverse elements.
Kate's speech in Gremlins about her father's death is a chilling moment that evokes deep fear through storytelling.

I was born in 1980 to parents who didn't watch movies. My mom's favorite movie was Jaws and still is, simply because it's one of the few she's ever seen. When I was a kid, she'd rather be watching Murder, She Wrote while my dad only watched sports and shows like The A-Team . When I was five, video stores weren't quite a huge deal yet, and we didn't have cable (yes, I'm old), so the only movies I saw were the "movie of the week" offerings on network TV. One week during the summer I saw a commercial for some movie called Gremlins . The big-eyed Gizmo was adorable, and I had to watch it. My mom, like so many mothers who were fooled by the PG rating , let me stay up late to see it, thinking I was about to watch an E.T. ripoff .

I had a suspicion that I was going to witness something a little more sinister than a story about a boy and his alien, but I kept those ideas to myself. Then I watched Gremlins . It scared me half to death... and I loved it! Those devilish, transformed Mogwai still frighten me, decades later , even when I've been desensitized to hundreds of horror movies. Joe Dante 's film was more than just a gateway to horror, however. It prepared me for every type of film, from rom-coms to Frank Capra , and everything in between. I wouldn't be writing about movies today if it wasn't for Gremlins .

A young man inadvertently breaks three important rules concerning his new pet and unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town.

Release Date June 8, 1984

Director Joe Dante

Cast Scott Brady, Susan Burgess, Don Steele, Keye Luke, John Louie, Hoyt Axton

Genres Comedy, Horror, Fantasy

Writers Chris Columbus

It's Not Debatable, 'Gremlins' Is a Horror Movie

For 30 years, there has been debate over whether Gremlins is a straight-up horror film, a horror comedy, or a family film with some horror elements . I'm here to tell you that it's the first and always has been. There is nothing family about it. Yeah, Gizmo is impossibly cute and I wanted a Mogwai as a kid, but he's also a ticking time bomb. Imagine a puppy that would multiply if it ate kibble after midnight, melt into goo if you took it for a walk during the day, and spit out murderous devil spawn if you dared give it a bath. No parent is getting their kid one of those, no matter how cute it is.

When the gremlin mayhem starts, it's a bloodbath, whether there's gore or not. Speilberg may have changed Chris Columbus ' hard-R script to make it more family-friendly, but that doesn't mean it's any less terrifying . If anything, it made it a little bit more scary because it was supposed to be safe . The kitchen scene, where Billy's badass mom, Lynn Peltzer ( Frances Lee McCain ), is forced to do battle with the monsters fresh out of their cocoons is chilling, especially when she goes into the living room and the red eyes of a gremlin appear in the Christmas tree behind her . To this day, I can't look at a lit-up Christmas tree without wondering what might be hiding in there. Mr. Futterman ( Dick Miller ) was a nice enough guy, like a grandpa (who's a tad bit racist), so to see him run down with his own farm equipment was unfathomable, as was Mrs. Deagle ( Polly Holliday ) being shot out of her window, even if she deserved it. These were adults behind the locked doors of their homes and they were being invaded.

Gremlins prepared me for zombie movies, where try as you may to hide and baton down against the invading horde, they still find a way in. When I was older and walked in awe through the horror section of video stores, staring at the box art like it was treasure, I came across Night of the Living Dead , Dawn of the Dead , and Return of the Living Dead . Gremlins got me ready for what they offered. Joe Dante's movie also got me curious about other monster movies, the ones that came before, from the classics like King Kong to the lesser titles like William Shatner in Kingdom of the Spiders . I watched every Gremlins -like clone I could get my hands on, whether it be Critters or the so-bad-it's-still-bad Hobgoblins . While they were often bloodier and more graphic, only a few, like George Romero 's best movies, could ever make me feel like I was a kid again.

'Gremlins' Also Got Me Ready for Other Genres

Gremlins also had some top-notch practical effects from Chris Walas . These monsters weren't bad-looking puppets, short people in suits, or stop-motion (outside of one scene). They were puppets and animatronics so lifelike that it felt like they were really there, making it impossible for my impressionable mind to suspend my disbelief. I couldn't wrap my head around how they made such magic. When I was a teenager, as I was wowed again by Chris Walas' effects for The Fly , and saw the impossible wizardry in John Carpenter 's The Thing , or the gross-out remake of The Blob , I still couldn't comprehend it. Watching a man's head detach from his body then grow crab legs and walk across the ground was the greatest magic trick possible — and that fascination started with Gremlins .

The R-Rated 'Gremlins' Movie We Never Got To See Made Its Hero the Villain

Even though Gremlins is a horror movie, that's not all it prepared me for. Joe Dante has several winks to Frank Capra films in Gremlins . The setting, the fictional Kingston Falls, New York, is a lot like Bedford Falls, New York from It's a Wonderful Life . There is even a scene of Billy Peltzer ( Zach Galligan ) running through Kingston Falls like George Bailey ( Jimmy Stewart ) does, and then later Billy watches that scene on his TV. To top it off, Billy works at a bank and is hounded by the rich and evil Mrs. Deagle. It makes you wonder how George Bailey would have handled a bloodthirsty gang of murderous, scaly demon creatures. I wasn't into black-and-white movies until I was older, but I couldn't help but think of Gremlins the first time I watched It's a Wonderful Life , or another classic movie shown on Billy's TV, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers .

At its heart, Gremlins is also a romance. Billy and Kate ( Phoebe Cates ) were adorable as two young adults falling in love. Their chemistry was palpable, and even at the age of five, it made me wish the neighbor girl across the street I went to school with looked at me like they did each other. I discovered that I was a kindergarten romantic because of Gremlins . It got me to seek out other romantic movies as I got older, whether it be anything made by John Hughes or When Harry Met Sally .

Kate's Speech in 'Gremlins' Is the Most Frightening Thing I've Ever Seen

The scariest part of Gremlins for me wasn't any of the gremlin mayhem but a much quieter scene where Kate breaks down and gives a long monologue to Billy about why she hates Christmas . While the studio wanted to cut the scene, Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante insisted that it stay in . Some argue that it's out of place and unnecessary, but it gives more depth to who Kate is. In it, she tells the story about how, as a kid, her father disappeared before Christmas. No one could find him and Kate and her mother couldn't sleep at night. During this time, a strange smell started coming from the chimney. As it got worse, Kate's mother called the fire department. They ripped open the chimney, expecting to find a dead animal, but instead pulled out Kate's dad dressed as Santa Claus . He'd been sneaking down the chimney with presents for Kate when he slipped and broke his neck.

This story terrified me like no other. I was already a bit scared of Santa Claus , as the idea of a stranger breaking into my house at night and watching me as I slept was not something to get excited about. More importantly, this scene from Gremlins didn't show me the horror but made me imagine it. I could see it in my mind, this man rotting in a chimney while inside the house while his family didn't know where he was. It gives me chills just to write it. When I watched Jaws for the first time a few years later and saw Quint's ( Robert Shaw ) long monologue about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis , it reminded me exactly of Kate's speech. Quint reliving the horror he went through during World War II was scarier than any seen shark attack. The horror in the unseen and having to use my imagination to visualize the horror also made The Blair With Project a frightening life-changer after it came out when I was 19. Kate's speech in Gremlins prepared me for all of it.

Almost 40 years later, Gremlins is still right there at the top of my favorite movies. What it showed me made me feel things that I hadn't seen on TV before. Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher had nothing on this. I had seen horror and I wanted more. I had seen practical effects done to perfection and I wanted more. I had seen hints of Capra and romantic comedies and I wanted more. I saw a movie that turned my imagination against me and I wanted more. Thank you, Joe Dante.

Gremlins is available to rent on Amazon.

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Watching Gremlins as a Kid Prepared Me for a Life of Loving Movies

May 27, 2024

Gremlins (1984) –…

Gremlins (1984) – Film Review

Comedy Horror Movies Science Fiction
November 12, 2023

“Gremlins,” the 1984 dark comedy-horror film directed by Joe Dante and produced by Steven Spielberg, is an eccentric and somewhat haphazard concoction that blends whimsy, horror, and a dash of suburban satire. A cult classic today, it’s one of those films that sits uncomfortably on the fence between being a family holiday movie and a creature feature, which could explain why it’s as fondly remembered as it is mildly traumatizing for a certain age group.

The Plot: Mischief and Mayhem in Suburbia

The film begins with an intriguing premise: a struggling inventor purchases a strange, adorable creature called a Mogwai as a Christmas gift for his son, Billy. The Mogwai, named Gizmo, comes with three important rules: no water, no food after midnight, and no bright light. Predictably, these rules are broken, leading to the creation of a group of malevolent gremlins who turn the idyllic small town of Kingston Falls into their personal playground of chaos.

The plot is a balancing act between adorable and abhorrent, as Gizmo’s cuteness is offset by the increasingly grotesque and malevolent gremlins. The narrative occasionally feels as haphazard as the gremlins’ rampage, veering from light-hearted comedy to dark and violent sequences that seem to revel in their own absurdity.

Behind the Scenes: The Magic and Madness of Movie Monsters

The creation of the gremlins was a marvel of practical effects, puppetry, and animatronics, crafted by Chris Walas. The creatures’ design is both ingenious and unsettling, walking a fine line between cartoonish and nightmarish. The production faced significant challenges in animating these creatures, particularly in scenes involving water, which notoriously complicated the puppet mechanisms.

Director Joe Dante and producer Steven Spielberg envisioned “Gremlins” as a darker, more nuanced film than the final product. The studio’s push for a more commercially viable, family-friendly film led to several script revisions by screenwriter Chris Columbus, softening some of the darker elements. This tug-of-war between the filmmakers’ vision and the studio’s demands is evident in the film’s tonal inconsistencies.

Cinematography and Set Design: Crafting Chaos

Cinematographer John Hora captures the film’s manic energy with a keen eye for the mayhem unfolding in the town’s quaint streets and homes. The set design of Kingston Falls, with its picturesque, snow-covered aesthetic, creates a stark contrast with the gremlins’ anarchic activities, adding to the film’s subversive charm.

Performances: Human Actors in a Puppet’s World

Zach Galligan as Billy and Phoebe Cates as his love interest, Kate, deliver performances that are earnest, if a bit overshadowed by the scene-stealing gremlins. The human characters often feel like they’re playing second fiddle to the creatures’ antics, acting as reactors rather than agents in the unfolding chaos.

Themes: Suburban Satire and Consumer Culture Critique

At its heart, “Gremlins” is a satirical take on the American Dream and the excesses of consumer culture, particularly around the holidays. The gremlins themselves can be seen as a metaphor for the unanticipated consequences of consumerism run amok. However, this satire is delivered with the subtlety of a gremlin in a kitchen blender – it’s in your face, messy, and you can’t quite look away.

Cultural Impact and Legacy

“Gremlins” left a lasting impression on pop culture, inspiring merchandise, sequels, and a place in the pantheon of 1980s cinema. It’s also partly responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating, as its blend of family-friendly storyline with elements of horror led to calls for a rating between PG and R.

In conclusion, “Gremlins” is a film that defies easy categorization. It’s a strange brew of horror, comedy, and holiday cheer that somehow works despite its many contradictions. The film is a testament to the magic of practical effects and the power of a simple story told with a generous helping of creativity and a willingness to push boundaries. It’s a rollercoaster of a movie experience – one minute you’re cooing at Gizmo’s adorableness, the next you’re gawking in horror as his brethren gleefully dismantle the norms of suburban tranquility.

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Gremlins Review

07 Dec 2012

106 minutes

Joe Dante's hilariously overblown comedy horror cheerfully pits man against beast in a cosy suburban setting. Zach Galligan is the hapless teenager who receives the oh-so-loveable Mogwai, Gizmo, for Christmas, completely disregards the instructions not to get it wet or feed it after midnight, and watches, along with his girlfriend Phoebe Cates, the mayhem unfold when the goggle-eyed cutie starts birthing evil sprites as a result. Played almost totally for laughs (even Cates' monologue on how she found out there's no Santa Claus has a vein of pitch black humour in it), this serves as a delightfully offbeat reminder of how inventive and witty blockbusters seemed when you were a kid.

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Gremlins (1984)

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Gremlins (1984) | Review by Pauline Kael

July 10, 2018

by Pauline Kael

When you look at the opening images of Joe Dante ’s Gremlins , you almost hear the words “Once upon a time, in a small-town movie…” Dante sets us down in Kingston Falls, a vaguely Middle American community that’s based on dozens of other movie-created nice, sleepy towns—especially the ones that are familiar to us from Frank Capra ’s 1946 It’s a Wonderful Life and from the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The people who live in Kingston Falls have no more depth than comic-book characters; the town even has a meanie—a Wicked Witch-Scrooge, Mrs. Deagle (Polly Holliday), who gets a kick out of foreclosing mortgages, especially now, at Christmastime. She threatens to destroy the only creature in town who defies her—Barney, a little dog who yaps at her and tries to attack her. Barney is the pet of the hero, Billy (Zach Galligan); at twenty, Billy aspires to be a cartoonist and comic-strip artist but is stuck in his job as a bank teller, because he’s supporting his parents. The only scenes that take place away from Kingston Falls are set in a Chinatown where Billy’s father, Mr. Peltzer (Hoyt Axton), an impractical dreamer-inventor—he devises contraptions that backfire—wanders about, trying to obtain orders for his malfunctioning gizmos, and in a nameless city he goes to for an inventors’ convention. It’s in the Chinatown, in the basement curio shop of an ancient Chinese sage (Keye Luke, in a long gray beard and with a milk-white glass eye), that Mr. Peltzer hears the near-human sounds of a mogwai, a tiny creature with the big, round eyes of a Pekinese and four-digit paws, who nests in a box. Peltzer wants to buy the mogwai as a present for Billy and offers two hundred dollars (rather casually, I thought, considering that he’s living off Billy’s wages). The sage refuses, but his grandson-—just a kid—follows Peltzer out, slips him the critter, takes the money, and gives him three instructions: don’t get him wet, keep him away from bright light, and never, never feed him after midnight.

The movie is, of course, about what happens when these rules are inadvertently disobeyed. The mogwai—Billy calls it Giz, for Gizmo—multiplies, and those mogwai also multiply, and though Giz remains harmless its progeny turn into greedy, demonic little gargoyles: dwarf dragons, with the jaws and teeth of crocodiles. About two feet high, they’re like the little devils of Hieronymus Bosch, but with a spark of drollery. They torment Giz the way, in the cartoons, Sylvester the cat tormented Tweety Pie. At times—when they play cards and carouse— they’re like race-track touts or underworld hipsters. And in one triumphantly insane sequence they invade the bar-and-grill where Billy’s girlfriend, Kate (Phoebe Cates), works nights, and, as she tries to keep up with their orders, they gorge themselves like a gang of happy juvenile delinquents, gloating over the size of their appetites. One of them flashes her, another wears leg warmers and does some break dancing, while yet another woozily sings the blues. When they get completely out of hand, Kate (in a takeoff of Rear Window) grabs her camera and shoots flashbulbs at them.

Good little Giz takes no part in their revels. Giz is an icky-sweet lap-dog sort of creature that sits in a box all day waiting to be picked up and cuddled; it doesn’t seem even to be ambulatory—all it does is make gentle cooing sounds and bat its eyelids. But the scuzzy, malicious peewee dragons are everywhere; one of them hides among a pile of stuffed animals as E.T. did, and now there’s a stuffed E.T. right next to the demon. What Dante appears to be up to is a demonstration that something charming, like E.T., can get multiplied beyond a moviemaker’s control. He’s also doing his own, black humorist’s parody of Steven Spielberg ’s E.T .—a demonstration that the underside of E.T. is like the monster in Ridley Scott ’s Alien . Or, to put it more baldly, he’s showing that E.T.’s id is Alien. Gizmo is a good child; the other mogwai are its aggressively vulgar, beer-guzzling brothers—children of the night. When one of them blows his snout on a drape, he’s like Jean Renoir’s Boudu expressing his contempt for bourgeois life by wiping his shoes on a bedspread. These demons are like bad pets making messes.

Dante has the sensibility of a freaked-out greeting-card poet. In Gremlins, even when he’s at his weirdest the blandness is there underneath, and when he defiles his vision of the good American life it’s Frank Capraland that he’s defiling. Once again, as in his segment of Twilight Zone (the family terrorized by the ten-year-old TV addict), there are too many kinds of parody floating around, but this time there are also too many kinds of old-movie cloyingness. The incongruities are tantalizing, but they don’t work to any larger effect, and the movie never turns into the malevolent fun it should be. For a good part of the time, Dante’s tone is (perhaps deliberately) uncertain. Kate has told Billy that she doesn’t like Christmas, and the explanation comes in a monologue she delivers about how she lost her father; it belongs to the theatre of the absurd, but Dante presents it in such an unresolved way that we don’t know quite when to laugh. And what are we to make of the fact that the first casualty of the demons is the one black man in the movie, the high-school science teacher (Glynn Turman)? Is the movie using the old, standard ploy of disposing of black characters fast, or is this a parody of all those movies in which the good, kind black fellow is the first victim of whatever menace is at hand? The scene doesn’t play like parody, but with Dante you often can’t tell what’s parody and what isn’t.

The director builds suspense by postponing the audience’s first view of the mogwai: we aren’t allowed to see it when Mr. Peltzer buys it, and when he brings it home it’s in a box tied up with ribbon. We don’t see it until Billy first sees it, but this revelation has no sock to it, because the creature is such a wet-eyed blob—a kitten painted by Walter Keane, adorableness incarnate. Billy might be more likable if he were appalled by his father’s assumption that he’d want this itty-bitty furball, and had to struggle to conceal his feelings. Billy is an autobiographical hero: as a boy, Joe Dante wanted to be a cartoonist (which, in a sense, he is: he never gets past cartoon characters with cartoon emotions). But Billy has been made out to be a considerate and responsible fellow—a personable dishrag. We can’t tell if we’re meant to see him as a younger version of his dreamer father or as a young man with the practical good sense that his father lacks. We don’t even know if Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates, who look alike in this movie (they have matching sets of teeth), are meant to be a charming pair or a spoof of dopey wholesomeness. (Where are their ids?) Gremlins doesn’t play by the rules or by the anti-rules, either. And Joe Dante seems to be trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces. The young actor Judge Reinhold looks as if he enjoyed playing smarminess, and he’s fine as a bastardly junior vice-president of the bank who brags about how quickly he’s rising (and leaving Billy at the bottom), but the picture introduces him, sets him up, and then seems to forget about him. Billy is provided with the dog Barney, who then has to be shunted aside while Billy becomes attached to Giz. Why didn’t the writer, Chris Columbus (an N.Y.U. film-school graduate), or Dante simply combine the plots and have Mrs. Deagle vent her anger on Giz, using that as the mechanism for setting Giz’s id in motion? (That might have given the picture a little more coherence.)

Movies are Joe Dante’s only frame of reference, and he slips in and out of movie conventions; I’m not sure that he himself knows when he means to be funny, since he seems to find the whole idea of making movies funny. But Gremlins isn’t dull; there’s always something going on. In one scene, we discover that Giz can reproduce musical tones; nothing comes of it. The picture is an unholy mixture—a whimsical pop shocker—and finally nothing comes of any of it. Dante can’t pull his ideas together, and the movie has so little emotional impact that it might be called affectless. Yet it’s obvious that Joe Dante is a genuine eccentric talent with a flair for malice, and it’s certainly clear why Spielberg, whose production company made the film (and who glides through a shot at the inventors’ convention, riding a little motorized cart), believes in him. There are some crack sequences. Upstairs in Billy’s house, the first batch of Giz’s progeny are in some gooey metamorphosing state while downstairs Billy’s mother—very well played by Frances Lee McCain— is in the kitchen baking gingerbread men. And although we may wonder whom they’re for—her husband and her twenty-year-old son?—they’re metaphorically perfect. McCain’s big scene comes just a minute later. Mrs. Peltzer, hearing strange noises upstairs, goes up to investigate. But she isn’t one of those dreary fools who inhabit the usual horror movie—the ones who go up to be slaughtered. She takes a very sharp knife, and from the set of her chin we know she means business. When she encounters the repugnant little dragons, she goes at them systematically, one after another, and when a couple of them make the mistake of invading her kitchen she traps one in the juicer (the only time her husband’s gadgets come through for her) and the other in the microwave oven. Her efficiency is a thing of beauty. This tough and determined Mrs. Peltzer wouldn’t be staying home playing housewife while her young son supported her (instead of having his own life); she’d be out making a living. But when a sequence is directed with the snap and freshness of this one, who cares?

The veteran horror-film actor Dick Miller (he looks like an older, more wizened Robin Williams) appears as Mr. Futterman, the town drunk, who accounts for his tractor’s not starting by referring to the gremlins that were supposedly planted in machinery in the Second World War. Miller gets a chance to show what a likable low comic he is in the kind of part that Barry Fitzgerald used to play. When Mr. Futterman’s TV goes on the fritz, he looks up at the antenna on his roof, which the demons have been using as a jungle gym; at that moment they come driving his tractor out of the garage and right through his living room. And Polly Holliday is a wonderfully astute and polished actress. She brings the Margaret Hamilton role a whiny, self-justifying undercurrent. You laugh at Mrs. Deagle because she’s just so awful; she’s someone you could love to hate. In her last moments on earth, Mrs. Deagle hears what she thinks are Christmas carollers, rushes to fill a pitcher of water so she can douse them, and opens the door to the fearless little devils (who should never be got wet).

For a movie that’s a pop junkpile of movie references, Gremlins has a surprising number of good things in it. There’s a marvellous effect when one of the mogwai falls into the swimming pool at the Y, and the whole body of water roils and smokes, like a Blakean vision of Hell, and from outside the building you can see the shadows of the demons who are taking shape. But the scenes that can make a claim to be inspired take place in the Kingston Falls movie theatre. It’s an ingenious location, since the mogwai have to be in darkness, and they have multiplied so lavishly that they fill the seats. The theatre is packed with these lewd hipster dragons watching their gnomish counterparts on the screen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ; they pad up and down the aisles, eating, laughing, commenting on the action, and tearing up the place. And when the Seven Dwarfs on the screen start to sing “Heigh-Ho,” the mogwai join in the singing. In their enthusiasm, they spin around on the projectors, and rip the screen to shreds. It’s a delirious, kitschy travesty—a kiddie matinée in Hell. In some ways, Joe Dante makes these antic demons as disgustingly adorable as Giz. They’re Katzenjammer Kids, and the action is all kiddie pranks in a cluttered comic strip.

It’s typical of Dante’s paranoid-cartoon approach that after this sequence Billy and Kate, who battle the demons in the theatre, must rush to do battle again in the town department store. The moviemakers have so many ideas that they lose track of their own central metaphor. The mogwai can’t stand bright light—it kills them. The movie—and this ties in with Kate’s monologue—is a Christmas Eve dream of something fearful coming down the chimney. When we see the mogwai at the debauch in the theatre, we may reasonably expect the sun to come up on Christmas morning and take care of them. The whole picture seems to point to that ending, because when the sun comes up movies end and our dreams are over. Gremlins just keeps going from one cartoon idea to another. There’s a lovely last shot of Keye Luke in a Christmas-card landscape, but the picture has already self-destructed.

Gremlins is leaving something behind, though. Is Giz meant to be as mawkish as I found it? A little boy who visits the Peltzer house fusses over how cute it is; Giz makes a face and says something on the order of “Oh, that again.” Joe Dante is certainly conscious of the creature’s ickiness; Giz is designed to make everyone say “Aw,” and the whole idea of the demons is based on Giz’s repression of everything that isn’t pure and sweet. But if Dante and his moviemaking team are aware of what a soft bundle of anthropomorphic ick this creature is, how can they be party to launching stuffed Gizmos into the toy stores of the world for children to covet and caress? It’s one thing for a movie to lead to the manufacture of toys that delight the public because they delighted the moviemakers. But selling Gizmos is a horrible joke.

The New Yorker , June 25, 1984

More: Gremlins (1984) , Joe Dante , Movie reviews , Pauline Kael

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Gremlins (Movie Review)

Luke's rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ director: joe dante | release date: 1984.

Revisiting staples of our past sometimes presents a number of issues. The biggest of which being the potential shattering of one's memory of something they once loved. Time catches up with us all and just like the grotesque wrinkling of our bodies movies have their own set of aging aches and pains. Yet as cliche as it sounds, a true classic never goes out of style and Gremlins is just one on a long list of horror classics that flourishes in spite of its age.

Gremlins paved the way for one of the cutest cinematic creatures of all time while also burning into our memories the three most important rules for a fictional pet ever. Billy (Zach Galligan) is a young man who is given an adorable furry creature called a mogwai for Christmas from his father. The mogwai, named Gizmo, has three essential rules that must never be broken- do not expose it to bright lights, do not get it wet, and never ever feed it after midnight. Billy manages to break all three rules in a short time. Getting a mogwai wet causes them to multiply depending on the amount of water. Feeding them however, sends them into a cocoon state that turns them into ugly green gremlins and they have a love for mischief...and Christmas caroling.

Rather you view it as a statement on holiday consumerism and traditions or just a fun family flick, Gremlins is endlessly rewarding even 30 years later. As is the case with most decades old movies the special effects don't always age as well as its overall entertainment value. However, in spite of the dusty effects used back in 1984 Gizmo and the gremlins still look as good as ever. The only hiccups come in the form of the moments of stop-motion animation used sparingly to show the ugly green monsters' strength in numbers.

The score still sells itself as a youngsters horror movie and the PG rating feeds into that expectation- however, the gobs of green gore saw to it that the MPAA standards endure a facelift. Today it's doubtful parents would allow their kids to watch a movie where a monster graphically melts into a puddle of goo- unless your that cool parent who love giving their kids nightmares. As kid-like as the score is near the beginning, the tried-and-true Gremlins theme is as endlessly hummable as ever. It'd also be easy to call Gremlins 'slow' with today's attention challenged tween audience, but one should never question Gizmo's ability to keep an aging horror nerd enthralled and bright-eyed.

There's a reason why horror buffs fear the idea of a Gremlins reboot, reimagining, remake, re-whatever- and it's because the original stands the test of time. Even with some mildly clunky stop-motion Gremlins stands head to toe with today's best horror comedies. In fact, some of the film's age flaws give it that much more character. A staple of the 80's, Gremlins remains a horror classic to this very day and will continue to be no matter how badly our remake culture tries to 'improve' upon it.

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Movie review: “Gremlins” (1984)

“What are they doing in there?!”

“They’re watching Snow White …and they love it.”

Gremlins isn’t a Christmas movie per se and yet it is my favorite Christmas movie, observing all 360 degrees of the holiday season – the warmth of simple pleasures and gathered family as ward against the cold; the balm of home and hearth belying some of its tackier trappings and base consumerism – through an appealingly dark lens while, counterintuitively, still treating the festivities with more heart and care than might your average “Santa is/toys are/elves are real/magic/cute” kiddie tract or “I’ll be home for the holidays” made-for-television romantic schmaltz. Joe Dante’s 1984 hybrid Americana monster movie/comic thriller, in which the improper care of an exotic house pet unwittingly unleashes a destructive plague of mischievous beasties upon an unsuspecting small town, is a savory Christmas confection coated in arsenic and wrapped lovingly in exploding sandpaper. It is sly and satirical, irreverent and inventive, cuddly and full of claws, propulsive, and wildly entertaining, channeling the anarchic spirit of golden age Looney Tunes cartoons into the live action arena in a way that had rarely before been contemplated, let alone realized.* I have no earthly idea – no, well, some – why Gremlins has not aged into a beloved holiday favorite outside of my household. Maybe it too effectively scares little kids? Maybe bigger kids identify too much with the gremlins themselves instead of the frazzled, folksy townspeople resisting them? Maybe it’s just not traditionally cheerful, or the Hallmark Channel definition of good, wholesome, family fun? Maybe not, but it is still all kinds of good, and all kinds of fun.

*Legendary “Termite Terrace” animator and Oscar-winning director Chuck Jones blesses the proceedings with a fun cameo as a bar patron, and the very sight of him fills my heart with figurative song. If “Gremlins” is my favorite Christmas movie, then the original, animated 1966 “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” – directed and, I would argue, shepherded artistically by the very same Charles M. Jones – is my favorite Christmas anything, and the only holiday special I make a point of watching each and every year.

Jovial inventor of malfunctioning comic kitchen aids Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) returns from a business trip with a very special present for his son Billy (Zack Galligan), a pet so rare and extraordinary that it will make him the instant envy of the neighborhood. The Peltzers gather around their fireplace for the unveiling, though Rand makes a point of first dimming the lights. What awaits them inside that weathered box from a Chinatown junk shop, the first and still best surprise in a film teeming with them, is not a gremlin at all but a…mogwai, a sort of tiny, furry, brown and white cross between a Rhesus monkey and teddy bear, with big eyes and even bigger ears. He’s cute, and shy, and smart. Billy predictably takes an immediate shine to the mogwai, who his father has named “Gizmo”, and the two set about getting acquainted, albeit within the purview of some oddly specific rules. Those famous rules surrounding the care and feeding of mogwai are, frankly, inane, untenable, and fall apart under the least scrutiny. Imagine if your pug or golden retriever was unable to lap up a bowl of water on a hot day, or leave the house during daylight hours. My mother has a German Shorthaired Pointer that is on high alert for the presence of people food at all hours, not just the ones “before midnight”, and attacks any quarry like a school of piranha. That’s part of the fun, a way for Dante to wink at the audience that, despite the straight horror trappings to come, he understands and embraces how absurd the whole thing is. It’s also running shorthand for the viewer, an easy way to process and remember three basic elements: 1) how gremlins are made; 2) how gremlins multiply; and 3) how to hurt them.

Call me a professional naysayer, but I just reflexively perk up at any mention of “practical effects”. We’ve all kinda been CGI-ed to death by this point, no? Gremlins , alongside the concurrent non-Muppet work of Jim Henson Studios, represents some of the most extensive and expressive puppetry ever put to film, contributing mightily to a moment when the artform was at its apex. Whether watching Gizmo roll his eyes knowingly in mock conversation or imitate new hero Clark Gable racing cars in To Please a Lady , or watching the newly hatched gremlins explore the nooks, crannies, and goodies of the invention-laden, surprisingly lethal Peltzer kitchen, or emerge en masse to march on the town in earnest, this is meticulous and impressive work. Gizmo is a wonder throughout, a fully realized character unlike so many central gimmicks routinely thrown at us by children’s or family fare, and the single biggest reason Gremlins works no matter who gets top billing. Everything about the little showstealer is perfectly calibrated to communicate maximum cuteness and personality, right down to his goofy, chirpy voice, which, provided by then-obscure standup and inveterate ham Howie Mandel, sounds like a purring kitten swinging around a squeak toy by the throat. At times the mogwai is an unalloyed vessel for childhood wonder, while at others he seems wise beyond his years. It’s almost a shame when young Billy breaks one of the rules and winds up with a banker’s box full of rowdy instant mogwai, then fatefully breaks a second one and wakes up to ghoulish cocoons gestating in place of Gizmo’s antisocial brethren.

When those eggs hatch, of course, all hell’s gonna break loose. That’s what we came for, but Dante and writer Chris Columbus also deserve major kudos for the way they set an evocative scene in the interim while effectively building anticipation for the big reveal. Gremlins’ mix of sentimentality, mirth, and mayhem is an incredibly tricky tone to properly balance and maintain, one that’s buoyed and informed by Dante’s evident love of not only classic cartoons but classic movies. The TV matinee ubiquity of It’s a Wonderful Life gives way to the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a portent of the nastiness brewing inside those cocoons. The little buggers seem to have an advanced knowledge of applied film psychology from the second they first set claw to floor, and offer up some sophisticated introductory scares followed by a full-on test of the then besieged PG-13 rating, as the Peltzer family kitchen is transformed into a gallery of creative culinary horrors. Billy and his girlfriend Kate (the ever-luminous Phoebe Cates) set off in pursuit of the cackling, advancing horde, always a step behind as the gremlins’ cheerfully terrorize locals in their homes, destroy an Irish pub in a happy hour gone haywire, and eventually congregate where Dante would – in a vintage cinema screening Snow White – to wait out the dawn. Veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith’s far-ranging score expertly provides whatever backdrop and/or emotional support the scene requires throughout, whether jaunty small town background music, sweeping romantic queues, or the truly maniacal, keyboard-driven “rampage theme”.

I miss Steven Spielberg the high profile producer. Still a force to this day, Spielberg spent the 1980s wielding an outsized influence over Hollywood that split the difference between cottage industry and cartel boss. His name above any title carried with it an implicit guarantee of quality ( Back to the Future, Goonies, Poltergeist, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? ), and Gremlins was among the first, and still the very best, of his marquee standard-bearers. Dante, who had a grand old time piloting the 1990 sequel quickly and completely off the rails, never lets the film’s action or ambition get above his head or beyond his grasp. He was wise to pitch the middle third of Gremlins as clever, increasingly tense mass infestation horror, cut with a healthy infusion of black comedy. That sequel, subtitled The New Batch would be even more anarchic than its predecessor but also colder, undeniably more manic but not nearly as fluid. Even in its most giddily chaotic moments, Gremlins radiates a underlying warmth suitable to roast chestnuts over. They may just take extra time to be edible. Unlike some perennials plucked from my childhood, I was delighted to find Dante’s inferno has barely aged in any but cosmetic ways (the cars, the technology). This is key, because so much of the film’s power lies in its ability to tap into an obscure but incredibly potent sense of place and mood that exists, latent, in our minds, and then thoroughly, delightfully upend it. The results make for surprising, thrilling, and dependably jolly – dare I suggest festive? – holiday fun.

“Gremlins” (1984) 4/4 stars

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Gremlins 2: the new batch, common sense media reviewers.

Campy horror sequel has unrelenting cartoonish violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

As a slapstick farce of a horror movie, there isn'

While an argument could be made that Gizmo learns

While there's mostly cartoonish violence, and a lo

A woman makes sexual advances on a man at dinner b

Gremlins build a gremlin out of Legos. A can of Jo

An elderly Asian man smokes from a long pipe. The

Positive Messages

As a slapstick farce of a horror movie, there isn't much in the way of positive messages.

Positive Role Models

While an argument could be made that Gizmo learns to stand up for himself, it would be a flimsy argument, as so much of the action is cartoonish and ridiculous.

Violence & Scariness

While there's mostly cartoonish violence, and a lot of it, there are some moments in the film that might be scary for younger viewers. A gremlin is shot in the head by another gremlin. A gremlin is killed when a man shoves him into a paper shredder, resulting in thick green goo spraying all over the man's suit.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A woman makes sexual advances on a man at dinner by rubbing her foot against his groin area. A woman asks if a man is hiding pornography in a drawer in his cubicle.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Gremlins build a gremlin out of Legos. A can of Jolt Cola is prominently displayed. Scenes in bars feature neon signs advertising Coors Light and Busch beer.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

An elderly Asian man smokes from a long pipe. The boss of one of the main characters is frequently seen smoking or lighting up a cigarette. Characters drink beer and cocktails at dinner. Dozens of gremlins take over a bar and are shown drinking and smoking. A chef on a television program drinks from a bottle of sherry.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Gremlins 2: The New Batch is the 1990 sequel to the hit '80s movie . It's more entertaining than one might expect, but much of that entertainment comes from cartoonish violence in the form of gremlins spending the last hour of this 90-minute movie running amok in a Manhattan high rise similar to Trump Tower. While not as gory as other horror movies, some of the gremlin deaths -- for instance, a gremlin getting killed via a paper shredder -- might be a bit much for younger viewers. Some of the satire of 1980s-style greed will also go over younger viewers' heads, as well as references to Ted Turner's attempts at colorizing classic black and white films in the late 1980s. There's mild profanity and a few mild sexual references. A troubling aspect worth mentioning is the stereotypical portrayal of an Asian character who does nothing but speak in broken English while taking nonstop photographs with his camera. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (4)
Kids say (12)

Based on 4 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Gizmo is removed from his Chinatown curio shop home after Mr. Wing dies and the shop is slated for demolition by billionaire developer and broadcaster Daniel Clump. He ends up caged in Clump Tower, where "mad" scientists prepare to conduct research on him. But when Gizmo's old friend Billy ( Zach Galligan ), who has moved to the Big Apple and is, coincidentally enough, employed in Clump Tower, realizes that Gizmo is in the building, he rescues him from the scientists. While forced into a business dinner, Billy sends his doting wife Kate ( Phoebe Cates ) to rescue Gizmo, but by the time she gets there, it's too late. Gizmo has gotten wet, thus unleashing an army of evil gremlins, who run amok in the skyscraper and threaten to take over all of New York City.

Is It Any Good?

GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH is surprisingly fun. While the first 30 minutes throws together just enough of a storyline to lead to the remaining hour of the movie (which is basically little more than sequence after sequence after sequence of gremlins getting into trouble in a Manhattan high-rise), this sequel mines a steady stream of laughs out of cartoonish violence and references to dozens of other movies.

It's a thin premise, but as the filmmakers knew, audiences don't watch sequels to Gremlins for deep character interaction -- they watch Gremlins sequels to watch gremlins going crazy destroying things. While there's lots of slapstick comedy, the movie also contains more sophisticated pop culture references and satire at the expense of moguls like Donald Trump and Ted Turner. It's a ludicrous, over-the-top kind of movie, and with the right expectations, it's the kind of movie that's enjoyable for its own sake.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about characters based on racial stereotypes. Why is it wrong to present characters in stereotypes based on their race, ethnicity, or gender?

How does this movie play with the conventions and "rules" of storytelling in movies?

How is the violence in the movie similar to and different from other horror movies?

Movie Details

On DVD or streaming : August 20, 2002
Cast : John Glover , Phoebe Cates , Zach Galligan
Director : Joe Dante
Studio : Warner Bros.
Genre : Horror
Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
Run time : 106 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
Last updated : February 13, 2024

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Ncuti Gatwa Is Great, But Doctor Who's Fifteenth Doctor Is So Bad At His Job

10 the office moments that made viewers quit the show, this office horror movie from 8 years ago is perfect to watch while waiting for severance season 2.

The movies of the Gremlins franchise might be too dark for some younger viewers, leading some fans to question whether Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai is suitable for children. MAX’s Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai is the first television spinoff from the Gremlins franchise. The animated series tells the origin story of Gizmo, the Mogwai Billy’s father buys at the beginning of Gremlins . Long before Billy became his owner, Gizmo lived an idyllic existence in the Valley of Jade. This paradise was home to the Mogwai, but Gizmo was rudely robbed from his homeland when an eagle kidnapped him while attacking his village.

While that might be a dark bit of Gremlins lore, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai is unsuitable for children. For decades, debate has raged over whether the original Gremlins movies were child-friendly or not. Alongside Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , 1984’s original Gremlins led to the creation of the PG-13 rating. Censors couldn’t decide whether the original movie was suitable for kids or not, and parents have been faced with the same conundrum for years since. Fortunately, Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai has a more straightforward answer.

Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai Is Suitable For Kids

Despite the reputation of the series, Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai is considered suitable for kids. In fact, two of Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai ’s creators themselves said that the series was intended for children. In a behind the scenes interview about Gremlins: Secrets Of Mogwai , it is mentioned that “ one of the things that was really important to us was to make sure that it was a co-viewing show, something that the entire family can watch together .”

The original script for Gremlins was an R-rated horror movie, while Gremlins 2: The New Batch was lighter, sillier, and more family-friendly than its predecessor. Thus, the confusion over the intended audience of Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai is easy to understand. Luckily, Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai ’s creators had this issue in mind while creating the spinoff series. With its young lead characters, Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai is perfectly suitable for viewing by children. Inevitably, the eventual arrival of the eponymous Gremlins themselves could be disturbing for some very young viewers, but the animation style renders these monsters a lot less threatening than their movie counterparts.

Why Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai's Rating Change Makes Sense

The Gremlins franchise as a whole has been far less child-appropriate before, but the appeal of a figure like Gizmo is inherent for kids and audiences of all ages. As such, capitalizing on Gizmo’s perennial appeal and leaning into his cuteness with a family-friendly outing makes sense. If Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai ’s main character was Spike, the malicious villain who led the Gremlins in the movies, the series would have likely been a less kid-friendly affair. However, with Gizmo as its lead, Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai is perhaps the most child-friendly piece of Gremlins media so far.

Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai (2023)

'The Garfield Movie' offers a new perspective on a familiar feline

by RYAN PAINTER | KUTV

Garfield (voice by Chris Pratt) and John Arbuckle (voice by Nicholas Hoult) in THE GARFIELD MOVIE. (Photo: Sony Pictures)

The Garfield Movie 2.5 out of 5 Stars Director : Mark Dindal Writers: Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, David Reynolds Starring: Chris Pratt, Hannah Waddingham, Samuel L. Jackson Rated: PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements.

Synopsis: Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt), the world-famous, Monday-hating, lasagna-loving indoor cat, is about to have a wild outdoor adventure! After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father – scruffy street cat Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) – Garfield and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered life into joining Vic in a hilarious, high-stakes heist.

Review: I can’t argue with the success that Jim Davis has had with his character Garfield. The comic strip has been running since 1976, there have been numerous films, and a couple of animated series. I’ve seen or read more than my share and have done so without complaint. “The Garfield Movie” is the first time that I’ve been asked to put a critical lens on the franchise.

Garfield has only ever really had one plot and it tends to take place on a Monday. Garfield is lounging, imagining eating lasagna. There is an obstacle in Garfield’s way that requires Garfield to figure out how to get lasagna. Garfield eats lasagna. Odie, a brown-eared beagle who is Garfield’s best friend, often gets in the way. He’s cute, energetic, not so smart, and the lighthearted comedy relief. Jon’s role as Garfield’s owner is to simply love the cat for what he is.

Screenwriters Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds begin the film with a flashback to Garfield as a kitten. A series of events involving a pizza leads to Garfield meeting Jon. Flashforward to Garfield, now grown, ordering lasagna on (presumably) Jon’s smartphone. It is delivered by drone. The modern world is perfectly suited to Garfield’s needs.

And then Garfield is catnapped.

This is a radical departure from what I’m accustomed to seeing from Garfield. Recasting a notoriously fat cat as an action hero could be an interesting choice. Unfortunately, it isn’t nearly as exciting as it must have looked on paper. Not even when the story takes on some emotional weight as it shifts to Garfield searching for his father. Are we witnessing a mid-life crisis?

Despite the introduction of some new character traits (which some will loathe on principle), this version of Garfield doesn’t feel nearly as removed from the classic interpretation that most of us grew up with as you would think. I didn’t feel like I was seeing anything particularly new. That might comfort some. It filled me with the desire to watch “Toy Story.”

I’m also not enamored with the casting of Chris Pratt. I’ve had Pratt fatigue for quite some time now. I do like Hannah Waddingham (except for the song they have her sing over the credits). I don’t think there is a job that Samuel L. Jackson will turn down. He’s fine, doesn’t seem to be phoning it in.

For all the newness, “The Garfield Movie” doesn’t feel particularly fresh. I do think most young people will enjoy it. Adults? Well, there are two needle drops that work well (and are likely to go over the heads of the kids).

All of that said, the children in the audience enjoyed it. I’ve even heard rumors that my niece and nephews thought it was great.

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A Real Pain

Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the odd-couple's old tensions resurface against the b... Read all Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the odd-couple's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the odd-couple's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.

Jesse Eisenberg
Kieran Culkin
Olha Bosova
1 User review
26 Critic reviews
84 Metascore
1 win & 1 nomination

Benji Kaplan

David Kaplan
Flight Attendant

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Trivia Jesse Eisenberg 's sophomore directorial effort after When You Finish Saving the World (2022) , both of which were produced by Emma Stone 's production company Fruit Tree and had their world premieres at the Sundance Film Festival.

Benji Kaplan : This, people, is what fucking film making is about.

Connections Referenced in Amanda the Jedi Show: The BEST and Weirdest Movies you (mostly) Haven't Seen Yet | Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

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Jan 28, 2024
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October 18, 2024 (United States)
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Majdanek, Lublin, Lubelskie, Poland (concentration camp)
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Extreme Emotions
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Runtime 1 hour 30 minutes

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