Hello, Burl here to consider a sequel! Ha ha, and Gremlins 2 is a little bit special among
sequels – many consider it superior to the original, which I’m not sure if I
do; but you can’t argue that it’s not quite a bit different! The story goes
that Joe Dante – director of Explorers,
Piranha and Matinee, ha ha – was given carte
blanche on this one simply because the studio wanted a sequel to the
original hit so badly! He was able to do just about what he wanted, and what he
wanted was to make a live-action Chuck Jones cartoon! Ha ha, so he did, and
this is probably more faithful to the Jones spirit than even Dante’s own Looney Tunes: Back in Action!
I didn’t bother going to see this one in the theatres,
though I should have! I was pinching my pennies that summer as I recall, saving
them for everything from Total Recall
to Last Exit to Brooklyn to Frankenhooker to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover to Jan Svankmeyer’s Alice, to Mo' Better Blues, and to Alan Rudolph’s Love At Large for some reason! So Gremlins 2 got the old cold shoulder,
and I didn’t see it until many years later, even though I was and remain a big
Joe Dante fan and an even bigger Dick “Lies”
Miller fan!
“Ha ha, Dick "Lies" Miller?” I hear you say! “Weren’t Mr. Futterman
and his wife killed by gremlins in the first one?” The answer is no, apparently
not! Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph (who also played husband and wife in Get Crazy, remember!) show up in New
York to visit Zach Galligan and Phoebe “Private
School” Cates and their little pal Gizmo! Both of the youngsters now work
in the Clamp Tower, owned by the Trump-like airhead Daniel Clamp! Ha ha, and
the next thing you know, gremlins have taken over the building, causing cartoon
havoc throughout!
Ha ha, the great thing is that Miller really takes a hand in
battling the little beasts this time around! He gets to be heroic and rescue
Zach Galligan – ostensibly the hero, but actually offloading all heroics to
Miller, Daniel Clamp, Phoebe Cates and Gizmo, along with several other
supporting characters – and fights a gremlin on the streets of New York! He’s
the only one who gets to do this, as all the other action is situated within
the building itself, making this yet another movie about being trapped in a
high rise!
It’s got plenty of gags, many of them pretty sharp (and I’ve
always been partial to the line “It’s like I’ve always said: if you want to find something weird, you have to go downtown!”), ha ha, but the
general silliness of everything means you don’t care much about what’s going
on! That’s one thing the original has over this one – it was grounded in some
form of recognizable reality, which I realize is an odd thing to say about a
manifestly backlot-bound picture about little transforming creatures, ha ha!
But whatever endemic goofiness Gremlins
had, the sequel has in triple spades!
The great thing here is the cast! Of course we have Dick
Miller, and almost as inevitably we find the underrated Robert Picardo, here
playing another officious brambleberry, like in Matinee but worse! And then there’s John Glover, who’s fantastic in
the Daniel Clamp role! Beyond that we have Robert Prosky, the garage owner from
Christine, as a melancholy Al Lewis
figure, the great Christopher "Starship Invasions" Lee essaying the role of a genetics scientist,
and a gorgeous redhead whose name I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten! Ha ha,
this building has everything!
It’s a big, professional production, with plenty of that
great Joe Dante pep! Ha ha, pep in general is not lacking here! Neither is Dick
Miller, I’m pleased to report! It’s a garden of pleasures, but also kind of an unmovie
– like a book of gags or point-form lists is to an actual story! There’s still
plenty to enjoy though, and just the fact that such an oddball studio movie
exists at all is a point in its favour! I’ll give Gremlins 2 two and a half portly twins!
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