The Films of 1990: Gremlins 2: The New Batch

At a crucial juncture in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), an agreeable if dopey millionaire -- an amalgamation of Ted Turner and Donald Trump – learns that if you create a place for things instead of people, you shouldn’t be surprised that things eventually live there.

Daniel Clamp (John Glover) thus comes to understand that his fancy Manhattan high-rise -- automated to the max and designed to sell, sell, sell -- ends up being a place not for human beings, but for gremlins. 

This is an explicit continuation of Gremlins’ (1984) technology critique, which I discussed here on the blog the other day.

We shouldn’t be surprised, the film suggests, when de-humanization actually de-humanizes us.  Play with the building blocks of life, like Splice of Life does, or put people under the thumb of 24-hour surveillance and security guards, or cook exclusively with microwave ovens….and people begin to behave…badly.

Monsters start popping up.

This social critique probably makes Gremlins 2 sound like a deadly serious film, but instead it’s a gag-a-minute, laugh-a-minute treat that skewers the modern age, circa 1990.  This is a time, the film tells us, when technology will either carry the day, making us all “monsters,” or humanity will re-assert itself.

Look up from your iPhone screen for a moment and tell me which side won that particular war.

Caustic and hilarious Gremlins 2 is also “inventive and explosive” according to The Christian Science Monitor’s David Sterritt, and “thoroughly enjoyable” according to Films in Review’s Edmond Grant. The film is much funnier than its predecessor was, though the trade-off may be difficult for horror films fans to accept. 

As brilliant and subversive as Gremlins 2 remains, it has lost some of the scary, suspenseful aspects of the original film.

Yet I suspect the trade-off is ultimately worth it. How many sequels are so delightful, and so thoroughly unpredictable?

“We hope you have enjoyed our programming. But more importantly, we hope you have enjoyed…life.”

Former Kingston Falls resident Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) and his girlfriend, Kate (Phoebe Cates) are having trouble adjusting to life in expensive, impersonal New York City.  In Manhattan, the duo works at the technologically-advanced but de-humanizing Clamp Center, the world’s first fully-automated office building and home to the Clamp News Network (CCN). 

After the death of Mr. Wing (Keye Luke Luke), Gizmo is taken to the Clamp Center by a scientist working at the Splice of Life genetic laboratories inside the building. 

Before long, Gizmo and Billy meet up again, and face another outbreak of malevolent Mogwai.

This time, the gremlins are enhanced by Dr. Catheter’s (Christopher Lee) genetic experiments.  The Gremlins soon add to their numbers with a brain gremlin, an electric gremlin, a vegetable gremlin (!), a bat gremlin, a spider gremlin and…a female gremlin.

“This is a complete failure of management.”

In America, we tend to worship those who introduce us to the next level of technology (and its accordant convenience) and make a fortune doing it. Gremlins 2 introduces us to the (great) character, Daniel Clamp, and it is impossible not to love him…but also impossible not to recognize him. 

He’s a little bit Ted Turner, who founded the nation’s first 24-hour news cable network and was a proponent of “colorization,” the expensive process by which old black-and-white films would be updated and made palatable for contemporary (but lazy…) TV-watching masses. 

Clamp is also a little bit Donald Trump (1946 - ), the increasingly unhinged man behind Trump Towers in New York City, Trump Tower Resorts (casinos and hotels…) and such best sellers as Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and Trump: Surviving at the Top (1990).

In Gremlins 2, Daniel Clamp (John Glover) is the self-absorbed dynamo behind Clamp Premiere Regency Trade Center, a high-tech sky-rise/headquarters and home to CCN: The Clamp Cable News Network. Clamp is the author of the best-selling I Took Manhattan, and his cable network airs Casablanca, “now in full color…with a happier ending.”

And when the Gremlins disaster occurs inside his building, Clamp even has a handy “end of the world” message to air on CCN, a funny reference to Turner’s famous boast that his CNN “won’t be signing off until the world ends.”

The social commentary doesn’t end with the (gentle) skewering of these powerful men, who helped to reshape modern America. The film also comments on the fragmenting or “balkanization” of television brought about by cable networks, a process which creates (in the film) “niche” networks like The Archery Channel, Microwaving with Marge, The Movie Police (starring Leonard Maltin), The Safety Channel and on and on.  

What’s the point? 

That technology (in this case the new shape of television) is merely separating us into our own little worlds, not building a community that reflects life, like Kingston Falls, for example.

Today, we are some way down the line from Gremlins 2.  We not only have over 200 channels, we have Internet streaming, 24 hour cable stations, and a host of other viewing options.  The “glue” that the mass media once used to hold us together as a nation is now gone. You can now choose the news (like a pizza topping) that best reflects your already-established world-view (conservative or liberal) and never be exposed to a new concept, or something that takes you out of your comfortable bubble.

Dante delves into pop-culture movie references too, commenting on the 1989 blockbuster Batman with a Gremlin-sponsored recreation of the movie’s ubiquitous bat logo. He ushers in jokes about the Wizard of Oz (“I’m melting”), The Marathon Man (“is it safe?”), and even laments the fact that a sequel was made to…Gremlins.

Once again, the point is that even our art is now de-humanized.

Batman is now a brand name and trademark, with a corporate logo you can’t mistake.  Forget individual artistry, the Dark Knight is an institution, not a vehicle for inventive storytelling! Matters such as story and character are less important than the creation of a perpetual money dispensing machine.  We watch a superhero movie from Marvel these days, and after the credits are over, we get a tease for another character, or another movie.  Then, we wait months for the trailer for that next movie, and anticipation is ratcheted up.  The actual product – the “movie itself” -- is just one piece of a never-ending media/marketing strategy.

Gremlins 2 likewise mocks the de-humanized essence of business jargon, which had grown and multiplied in American culture by the 1990s like some sort of terrible verbal plague. Workers were no longer asked to come up with good ideas…they had to “think outside the box.” Workers were no longer charged with blending departments, but finding and exploiting their “synergy.” They no longer had to simply do better at their job; they had to “take it to the next level.” 

This kind of inhuman gobbledygook -- this business-speak -- is mimicked and expanded upon with great success in Dante’s film. For instance, the revolving doors at the Clamp Tower entrance remind workers to “have a powerful day!” 

Similarly, characters don’t discuss career aspirations, they reflect on “situational long term outlook perspectives” and “career opportunity advancement.” Even ceiling lights are no longer just lights they are part of an “illumination system.”

And a takeover of the building by malevolent green gremlins is not a catastrophe, a disaster or even an invasion according to some, but rather a failure of management.

So the film tells us that to go along with our inhuman technology, we have developed inhuman modes of communication.

If one catalogues all of these pop culture jokes, a common thread grows detectable. What Dante laments in Gremlins 2 is the coarsening of the American arts and culture and even national dialogue to the point that everything and everybody is a product; a vehicle for squeezing out a profit.

“When art and business join forces,” declares one character in Gremlins 2, “anything can happen.”  He means it as a net positive; but Dante means it sarcastically.

Gremlins 2 is prophetic in understanding the pitfalls of this modern approach. 

Have you been a success in real-estate? 

Write a book and proselytize your success!

Direct a successful movie? 

Market it and make a sequel!

Have a good idea for a restaurant? 

Franchise it! 

Yet in a culture where the all-mighty dollar is so important, qualities such as individuality and creativity – nay, artistry -- eventually lose their significance.  Clamp’s two-hundred-and-fifty million dollar high-rise, a monstrosity of mechanization, voice-operated elevators, self-cleaning ash trays, surveillance cameras and “eye-pleasing, color-coordinated, authorized art,” is not an environment fit for unique, individual human beings. 

Instead, it’s a big fat, high-tech “work”-extruding beast.

The Gremlins -- the very embodiment of Loki; of chaos and anarchy – descend on Clamp Towers and very quickly prove…bad for business.  They get into the “natural” ingredients at the Yogurt Stand.  They destroy “Splice of Life,” a genetic laboratory that is the very representation of profit put ahead of responsibility and science run amok.  They foul the complicated phone system in the building, and in one wicked joke, are consigned to a hell called “hold,” where the muzak never stops.

Is it a wonder that monsters exist in a world like this?

 

Gremlins 2 is probably the closest thing to a live-action cartoon you are likely to see, but all the mayhem, all the brilliant effects carry pro-social weight.  The real movie monster is our craven consumer culture, and our desire to possess new, better technology. This monster is everywhere, infiltrating every walk of life.  It’s in our television (“an invention for fools,” says Mr. Wing), it’s in our newscast, here presented by a man in a vampire suit (a literal bloodsucker), and it’s in our most revered businessmen like Clamp, who still wants to merchandise Gizmo…even after all the anarchy.

What makes this point so interesting to contemplate is that Dante decides, in this sequel, to make the gremlins non-generic even as the world of humans becomes more generic. There’s not just a furry creature and an evil one here, like in the first film. Instead, we meet dozens of individual gremlins. There’s one little guy with googly eyes who acts like he needs Ritalin, stat. There’s Greta, the female gremlin. There’s one mogwai who becomes a gargoyle. And, of course, there’s my favorite, the delightful Brain Gremlin (voiced by Tony Randall), who wants only, “civilization.” 

Thus, the shape of the film might be interpreted as a mirror of the overall critique. To destroy a world of homogenized, inhuman technology and jargon, you need a return, perhaps, to messy individualism.  The Gremlins -- funnier, and more colorful than ever -- provide that antidote.

Gremlins 2 is wicked good fun, and one sequel that not only differentiates itself from the original, but in some way, exceeds it. I watched both Gremlins films with my son, Joel, and he couldn’t decide which he liked better. He liked the original, he said, because it told a scarier, more suspenseful story.  He liked the sequel because it upgraded the monsters and was very, very funny.

In my assessment, Gremlins fits together better as a coherent central idea or movie, but Gremlins 2 takes the cake in terms of ingenuity and humor. In the final analysis, original or new batch matters little because the franchise provides viewers two remarkable films.

Movie Trailer: Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

The Films of 1985: Explorers

Two movies wage a war for supremacy in Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985).

One movie is a quasi-Spielberg film that lionizes childhood and pays tribute to the 1950s science fiction (and even no-science fiction) productions familiar to and beloved by baby boomers

The second film feels much more indicative of Dante’s creative approach and is an irreverent, subversive, film that depicts alien first contact by way of a Looney Tunes-like universe.

The problem with Explorers is that these two films and tones don’t fit together in the slightest. 

And since the film starts firmly in Spielberg mode, it is that mode which -- whatever its sentimental pitfalls -- should have carried the day.

However, the wonder, innocence and majesty of Explorers’ first half finds no purchase, no outlet and no resolution in the film’s disappointing third act.

Even the film’s star, young Ethan Hawke, looks befuddled and dispirited by the alien stand-up comedy and rock-and-roll performance he must endure during the film’s movie-killing climax.

The unspoken question roiling beneath Hawke’s expressive young face is one that all viewers of the 1985 film will share. 

We traveled all this way and fell in love with these characters…just for this?

For cut-rate, cartoon aliens doing bad imitations of Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope and Desi Arnaz?

I first saw Explorers at the Royal Theater in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in 1985, when I was fifteen years old.  Even then, I understood a simple fact about the film’s drama and structure. The film’s trio of young protagonists -- so open, enterprising, imaginative, and full of hope -- deserved a journey that honored their good character.  They deserved an odyssey like the one Exeter teased in This Island Earth (1951) and which is excerpted explicitly in Explorers. 

They deserved an opportunity to interface with a “vast universe…filled with wonders.” 

Instead, this triumvirate reached the stars only to find that even in space, it is impossible to escape TV reruns and baby-boomer nostalgia.

“I’m afraid my wounds can never be healed.”

Bullied at school, young Ben Crandall (Hawke) dreams of flying at night.  

One night, he dreams of flying over a landscape that transforms into a high-tech circuit board.  When Ben shares his notes about this dream with his friend, Wolfgang (River Phoenix) and they are put into a computer, Ben realizes that another intelligence is communicating with him.

Along with another boy, Darren (Jason Presson), who comes from “the wrong side of the tracks Ben and Wolfgang experiment with the alien technology, creating a force bubble that can mitigate forces of acceleration, gravity and inertia.

In other words, the bubble is a force-field of sorts, protecting any object or person that happens to be inside it.  Ben and the other boys resolve to build a spaceship, and visit the local junkyard to create a small craft, which they christen The Thunder Road. It is built from a Tilt-a-whirl.

After a second dream, which provides information about life-support inside their ship, Ben and the others take to the stars to visit their benefactors.  

They leave Earth, and a nosy police man (Dick Miller) behind, and travel to space to reckon with some very strange alien beings…

“It could be something we can’t even imagine.”

One brand of Spielberg’s aesthetic, as represented by E.T. (1982), and to a lesser extent, Jaws (1975), Close Encounters (1978), Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Invaders from Mars (1986) and Super 8 (2011), is clearly on view in Explorers’ first two acts. 

Like some of those films, this one involves precocious but disillusioned youngsters who, through a surprising connection with the supernatural/paranormal, re-discover magic and wonder in their often-disappointing lives. 

As we have seen in some Spielberg films (and the films of his contemporaries), “this boy’s life” in Explorers is one in which the traditional middle-class family has failed the enterprising child. Darren’s mother is dead, and his father’s attentions are elsewhere, even though he lives in suburbia (also the setting of E.T. and others).  Ben, meanwhile, seems to live in a world where parents are absent.  At school, he is the victim of a bully named Jackson. These views of childhood can be compared with instances of parental death or divorce in Super 8 and E.T., respectively.

A key location in all these films is the central boy’s bedroom, a sanctuary which he decorates with products/items that reflect his imaginative nature. In this case, we see that Ben has a poster of It Came from Outer Space (1953) on his bedroom wall, and that his disk is littered with Marvel Comics.  And playing on the TV while he sleeps is George Pal’s War of the Worlds.

Thus we can extrapolate that Ben has escaped an unhappy (or at least unsatisfying) family life by escaping into his bedroom…and the fantasy worlds offered in popular entertainment.

Because Spielberg, Tobe Hooper, and Joe Dante are all boomers, they tend to imbue their adolescent characters with a love for older science fiction films, even though it is not, necessarily, a realistic quality. I was a kid at the same time as Elliott or Ben, or Billy (the 1970s-1980s), and I was into Star Wars, Space:1999, Planet of the Apes and Star Trek, not of the productions which get call-backs here: The Thing (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), and Forbidden Planet (1956).  I made it my mission to see all those films, of course, and I admire them all tremendously, but they were not bedroom poster-worthy to my generation, if that makes sense.

Therefore, it is not too difficult to understand that these tributes to older films -- in E.T., Explorers and the like -- represent the filmmakers’ reckoning with their own childhoods. They are re-imagining their own youth in these 1980s films, and that sometimes adds a self-indulgent quality to the art. It would be like me making a film about kids today, and decorating their bedrooms with Space:1999 (1975 – 1977) or Battlestar Galactica (1978 – 1979) posters. Fun as an allusion? Sure.  Realistic? Not particularly.

Ironically, in terms of science fiction movies, the 1980s works of Spielberg and his contemporaries -- all of whom I admire very much -- actually represent a paradigm shift away from 1950s and 1960s genre works.

In older films, like Forbidden Planet or even Kubrick’s 2001, explorers in space and time voyage to the edge of reality, to the frontier, and are challenged to recognize new ideas there. By contrast, in some 1980s films brandishing the Spielberg aesthetic, explorers in space and time encounter the paranormal and find worlds and beings not that challenge their concept of the universe or their belief system, but that bring them emotional comfort; that reinforce their imaginative/fantastic belief systems.

Elliott needs a friend, and E.T. teaches him how to connect to others. The kids in Explorers visit the stars, and meet there alien children who steal their father’s car/spaceship, and quake in fear from menacing parental figures.

The message?  Kids and parents are alike all over.

The aliens’ reason for not visiting Earth in Explorers is even dramatized in terms of baby boomer cinema. The aliens show the human children a montage of humans treating aliens badly, including imagery from 20,000 Million Miles to Earth (1967), The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), and so on. The sub-textual message is that aliens can’t visit Earth because our parents ruined everything, just as they ruined our lives.

Accordingly, Explorers lionizes innocence…so much so that alien beings are not different creatures to reckon with, but mirrors that validate a childhood perspective on life.  It’s the Peter Pan syndrome. Also in the film, an older policeman, played by Dick Miller recalls that he once dreamed of going to the stars, but that those dreams receded as he grew up. Again, a message is wrought: adults need not apply for the magical Explorers space program. Only the very young, and the very innocent, may board this flight.

Apparently, in space we can only expect to meet beings who will fill our empty spots, not beings who will challenge us to grow, and evolve, and become better than we are.

Clearly, this idea can work beautifully, and even feel magical on occasion, as E.T. and Close Encounters aptly demonstrate. They are great films.

But Explorers seems to tread a step too far in the same direction, suggesting that imagination, tenacity, and optimism will be rewarded only with a world of perpetual boomer references or allusions, one where Ed Sullivan, Mr. Ed, Bugs Bunny and Tarzan are always on the tube, always repeating their greatest hits.  Explorers reduces all the wonders of the universe to a closed-loop of 1950s nostalgia, and therefore undercuts the very message of great films like Forbidden Planet, or even This Island Earth.  

The scenes here with the goofy, TV-quoting aliens, truly betray the film’s beautiful first half, which strikes a deep chord with me on a personal level in some regard. Specifically, much of the early portions of Explorers involve the building of a spaceship out of junk and spare parts. A tilt-a-whirl ride is the basis for the spaceship that Ben, Wolfgang, and Darren build, but other pieces are added on, and that little ramshackle spaceship is a wondrous thing: a manifestation of childhood imagination.

I remember very clearly when I was a young man, watching as two friends built -- out of whatever they could find -- a raft that they hoped to sail down a nearby river.  I remember seeing them in the neighborhood one day, spare parts on their backs, bags of snacks in their hands, as they prepared for the launch of their “ship.”  I don’t know if the raft ever proved sea worthy, but I have always remembered their joy at the possibility of building a vessel that could carry them…away, to the unknown. 

In ways profound and wondrous, the first half of Explorers captures that youthful feeling of assembling a dream; of building with your own hands a vehicle that could alter your destiny and carry you to new horizons. The early scenes in the film that find the youths experimenting with the alien force bubble and constructing their own ride to the stars remain magical, and meaningful. Indeed, they are so compelling, well-wrought and charmingly performed that the film’s final act plays as all the more disappointing.  If you watch the film closely, you can’t help but love Ben, Wolfgang and Darren.

The Thunder Road (the name of the ship, provided by Darren) and her crew ultimately deserved a journey of discovery and wonder, not one that found the final frontier was just…old TV. 

The promise -- as Ben clearly enunciates it -- is to “go where no man has gone before” (not just a TV reference, but a promise of new territory explored), and see something that humans “can’t even imagine,” something that could qualify as “the greatest thing ever.”

Ask yourself? Do the Looney Tunes alien fit the bill? As the greatest thing ever? As something unimaginable?

If not, what could the aliens have looked like instead?  Perhaps they could have been being who understood that a dream is best when shared and when built, piece-by-piece with your own hands. 

In the film, Ben and Wolfgang (and eventually Lori and Darren) dream of the technology they need to touch the stars. They share a kind of “hive dream” universe, and yet the childish, bug-eyed aliens we meet in the finale don’t seem capable of having sent these dreams to them. That’s an important disconnect in the film.

Explorers needed aliens who were more like teachers, or benevolent parents, perhaps, than like Bob Hope-quoting bug-eyed juveniles.  Why?  So Ben and the others would see that life wasn’t just disappointment after disappointment, but the possibility of them building a brave new world together.

Explorers also hasn’t aged well in terms of its treatment of Lori (Amanda Peterson). I realize that the film is thirty years old, but Lori is a virtual non-character in the film. She is a prize for Ben to “win” at the end of his adventure, and a character who never gets to ride in the Thunder Road, or visit the stars.

Even when I was fifteen -- thirty years ago -- I knew that was wrong.  Girls dream big too and possess great imagination, so Lori should have been a major character in the film, not just Ben’s reward for reaching the stars. I trust the anticipated remake of the film will rectify this problem.

Before Explorers, Joe Dante was on something of a roll, having directed Piranha (1978), The Howling (1981), and Gremlins (1984), all terrific films in my estimation. I have read that Explorers went into production, however, without the team settling on an ending. I’m afraid that the absence of a carefully-plotted, coherent third-act shows. It handicaps the film. The film’s first half -- while soaked in Boomer self-indulgence -- nonetheless captures the wonders of childhood, and the amazing feeling of building your destiny, one spare part at a time.  The last half of the film, which wallows in pop culture kitsch, is a misstep for the ages.

To misquote Exeter from This Island Earth, I’m afraid Explorers’ inconsistent approach to its narrative is a grievous wound, one that “will never be healed.”