Satire, Self-Parody and Loving the Chaos of ‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch’
After Gremlins turned out to be a massive hit, Warner Bros wanted a sequel almost immediately. The problem was that director Joe Dante had no desire to direct one. In his successful career, he had never done a sequel, although there had been sequels made to his films before. Legendary filmmaker James Cameron began his directing career with Piranha 2: The Spawning, the sequel to Dante’s Roger Corman produced Jaws send-up. Dante’s 1981 werewolf movie The Howling launched a slew of sequels. By the time Gremlins 2: The New Batch was released in 1990, there had been six Howling films. Gremlins had also been an absolutely grueling shoot.
The film had only cost $11 million (within the same ballpark as Child’s Play, for context, which had only one diminutive antagonist to worry about) the puppets and animatronics had been notoriously tricky to work with, and there had been tons of them. Once released, it became oversaturated very quickly. Gremlins was merchandised within an inch of its life. There was also controversy given that it was one of the two films, alongside Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that led to the creation of the PG-13 rating, because even though it was mostly intended for kids, it had a very hard and horrific edge to it at times.
So there were a million reasons for Joe Dante not to want to direct the sequel. As it turns out, the execs at Warner were so desperate to recreate that success — which meant not only another Gremlins, but another Gremlins with Dante at the helm — that they presented him with the classic “offer he couldn’t refuse.” They told Dante that if he directed Gremlins 2, he could have total, complete creative control. That is an offer that the director has remarked that he had never been given before or since.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch is the result of that offer. This film is Dante at his most unrestrained. The undercurrent of Looney Tunes antics that had been very much present in not only the first Gremlins, but every movie of Dante’s career, now rises to the top and dominates absolutely everything else. Gremlins 2 is a live-action cartoon.
The thing that is so staggering about this movie is that it doesn’t just poke fun at the studio, or at its own success, it absolutely roasts both things at the pure peak of that success. Warner Bros. was so desperate for a Gremlins 2 that they let Dante do whatever he wanted and the result was the best case of a filmmaker biting the hand that feeds him in cinema history. The commentary and satire are not just ancillary things, either, they are baked into the story. Gremlins had been absurdly merchandised and six years later, that was absolutely still happening. There had been everything from dolls and plushies to children’s books, advent calendars and breakfast cereals. Couple that with a sequel that is literally about branding the Gremlins as they break into the genetics lab and transform into all kinds of brand-new, hyper-marketable monsters.
Gremlins 2 drags the creatures out of the small town of Kingston Falls and into the Big Apple, where they run amok inside Clamp Tower, named after billionaire CEO Daniel Clamp, a take on Donald Trump, and while he was still very famous at the time, this was twenty-five years before that man became completely unavoidable. The tower is a capitalist dream. A TV network, a mall, business offices and even a genetics lab all under one roof, and all completely dependent on automation. Things are already faulty from the beginning, that’s truly the key here. For a price tag in the billions, the tower only functions mildly better than Mr. Peltzer’s inventions in the first film. It takes barely any time at all for the Gremlins to reduce the bustling skyscraper to complete chaos.
The film as a whole gleefully devolves into that chaos, too. It invites us to ride along beside the Gremlins this time, and to revel in that irreverence. The references come fast and furious, poking fun at everything from Marathon Man to The Phantom of the Opera. There are plenty of jokes at the studio’s expense as well. One Gremlin blatantly gets a tattoo of the Warner Bros. logo on its chest and proudly shows it off to the camera. Just a year after Warner’s massive blockbuster hit, Batman, a Gremlin develops bat wings and crashes through the window as it flies away, leaving a perfect bat symbol behind.
But the jokes at its own expense are where the film truly shines. Famed critic Leonard Maltin recites his own review before this time being devoured by the creatures as his show cuts away to static. There’s a hilarious, almost Seinfeld-esque conversation in the control room breaking down the befuddling mechanics of how the “never feed them after midnight” rule even works, factoring in time zones and the fact that, really, given the way time works, every minute except actual midnight qualifies as after midnight. Toward the end of the movie, there’s the absolutely brutal call back to Kate’s horrific Santa Claus monologue in the first movie. This time, the mention of Abraham Lincoln sends her into a trauma dumping anecdote about something that happened on Lincoln’s Birthday before Billy simply cuts her off and tells her there’s no time for that.
And then there’s Gizmo himself. Gizmo’s very appearance, designed by Rick Baker this time around, seems like a commentary on the original. The fluffy Mogwai had taken the world by storm, become a beloved stuffed animal, and so this time they dial up the cuteness of his design as much as humanly possible. This is the maximum of how cute Gizmo could possibly look, I’m convinced. That only makes it funnier that Gizmo has an entire arc throughout Gremlins 2 related to his image, that he’s seen as the cute one, the nice one, that he’s a bit of a pushover.
Where he watched old teen racing films on the TV in the first movie, this time he watches Rambo. This time he has a training montage as he, more or less, learns to fight back. This time he sports a red headband just like Rambo, which he refuses to take off even after the danger is over, in an attempt to take some control over his image and the way that he is perceived.
All of this works because Gremlins 2 has an impossibly perfect tone. It’s totally irreverent and somehow straitlaced in its goofiness. The Gremlins are expectedly over-the-top, and then some, but some of the best gags don’t even involve them. My favorite bit in the entire movie is when Clamp realizes how bad things are getting and puts a prepared apocalypse video in the VCR, which proceeds to play tranquil footage of a stream and the American flag, accompanied by the narration, “Due to the end of human civilization, the Clamp Cable Network now leaves the air. We hope you have enjoyed our quality programming, but more importantly, we hope you have enjoyed life.” That is the epitome of the anarchistic spirit of Gremlins 2.
That’s pure Joe Dante, delivering an absurdly funny, scathing satire of the corporate mindset. He always got away with making fun of the studio at the studio’s expense, as long as he delivered it more or less on time and on budget, and he did it with a huge smile plastered to his face. A smile befitting, well, a Gremlin.
