CRITTERS

Directed by Stephen Herek. United States. 1986.

What do you get when you mix GREMLINS with a 1950s camp sci-fi flick, and add in a dash of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD for some extra crunch? You get CRITTERS, Stephen Herek’s excellent horror sci-fi mash-up about a horde of ravenous Furbies laying siege to a family farmhouse. No, it isn’t as flashy or impressive as Joe Dante’s twisted Christmas classic, but it has sincere charm and plenty of hilarity. What it doesn’t have is a lot of scope. This is a surprisingly cozy movie considering people are eaten alive in it.

English-speaking aliens await the arrival of a cargo of Krites, angry little hedgehog-like creatures with sharp teeth and paralytic quills they can shoot like arrows. Ten Krites, to be exact. No, make that eight. Two had to be killed because Krites are not well-behaved. Hopefully, nothing goes wrong. You would hate for the little bastards to escape. Which, of course, they do, stealing a craft and hightailing it to the nearest planet. The aliens send two faceless bounty hunters to Earth to track the little critters down. Once here, one bounty hunter takes the form of a popular rock star. The other… well, he takes plenty of forms. First, he takes the appearance of the Krite’s first victim, a sheriff’s deputy. Then, a preacher. Then, the town drunk.

It takes 25 minutes for the Krite craft to crack the atmosphere, so we get plenty of time to get to know the Brown Family. There’s patriarch Jay, his lovely wife Helen, their daughter April, and bad news Brad. Brad is your average teenager. He spends his time making explosives and shooting things with his trusty slingshot. April has a boyfriend named Steve, and Jay employs a conspiracy-theory nut job named Charlie as a farmhand. That’s the town drunk I just mentioned. He thinks aliens are communicating with him through his fillings. We’ll eventually meet the town Sheriff, Harv, his deputy Jeff, and their dispatcher, Sally. That’s basically the entire cast. GREMLINS lets its nasty green buggers run rampant all over town. CRITTERS, on the other hand, is a siege movie, through and through. The farmhouse is our main location, and we rarely leave it for long.

After supper, April and Steve sneak off to make out in the barn. Brad plans on ruining their night with some homemade fireworks. Unfortunately, the Krites throw a monkey wrench in his delinquency. Brad and Jay spot the Krite spacecraft soaring overhead. They go off to check on it, only to find one of their cows disemboweled. They rush home, swearing each other to secrecy. Best not to tell Mom. Wouldn’t want her to worry. For a movie so enamored with the classic sci-fi flick set-up of a small community versus a threat from outer space, it’s nice to see the kids and the adults come to an understanding right off the bat. Films of this type usually have the parents disbelieving the kids until the threat is at the front door. Here, when the threat comes, everybody is on the same page.

The Krites cut the phone lines and chew through the power cables. When Jay ventures into the basement to check the circuit breaker, he gets his leg gnawed on. This is where we learn two valuable things about these creatures. One, their quills can paralyze their victims, and two, there is no way in hell to take these monsters seriously. They look a bit like tiny versions of the crate monster from CREEPSHOW. They’re obviously hand puppets and, as such, lack complex movement. Thankfully, they gibber, shriek, giggle, and groan like drunk monkeys. They even speak to each other. The film helpfully gives us subtitles so we can understand them.

But as cheap as the Krites are, they are full of personality, and watching them roll away from danger (or into an open toilet after getting their quills singed) or explode from gunfire never stops being hilarious. They don’t have 1/20th the personality of a single Gremlin, but they’re amazing nonetheless. GREMLINS unleashed a short parade of shitty ‘mini-monsters run amok’ movies, chief among them MUNCHIES, GHOULIES, and HOBGOBLINS. None of those films live up to CRITTERS. Some of them live up to the sequels, though. But let’s not talk about them.

The bounty hunters arrive and commandeer the dead deputy’s car. They rudely interrupt a church service by blowing up a few things. They do the same thing at a bowling alley. These are bounty hunters, after all, not undercover cops. They carry massive alien weapons, real state-of-the-art bang-bangs, and are not shy about using them. This alerts the local sheriff, and just like that, everyone is heading to the Brown farmhouse for the epic showdown, including us.

While we wait for the cavalry to arrive, Steve gets his fingers bitten off and his guts eaten. The family sets aside their differences and bonds over some alien extermination, blasting the Krites with a shotgun while occasionally getting nailed with quills and having their extremities violently nibbled. A serviceable plot synopsis is difficult. Not because the film is uneventful. It just revolves around tiny set-pieces. Krites corner the family on the stairs. Mom gets hit in the neck with a quill and has to be protected until she comes around. Each family member gets a chance to kill a Krite, often with gooey results. This isn’t exactly story-driven stuff. The bounty hunters arrive for last-minute clean-up, while Brad rushes to save his kidnapped sister from an uber-Krite the size of a Volkswagen Bug.

The bounty hunters are the obvious stand-in for the military in this movie, the big guns with the firepower to fight, but not the heart to win. In classic 50s sci-fi fashion, it's the community (in this case, the Brown family) that ends the threat for good, not the military. The family (community) stands steady and defends their home (town). Of course, CRITTERS has a sense of humor, so the bounty hunters do far more damage to the farmhouse’s structural integrity than the Krites ever do. Until the final few minutes, that is, when the fleeing Krite craft spitefully blows the farmhouse to atoms, giggling as they pull the trigger. Because this is a good movie, the Brown family cat survives without a scratch.

Look, CRITTERS is great fun. It’s not worldview-altering, nor does it belong in the elite echelon of 1980s science fiction cult classics. I prefer CRITTERS 2 to the original, and I doubt I’m alone in that. The later sequels are hot garbage. CRITTERS has a simple premise and a carefully curated cast of characters. They all have great personality and wonderful interplay. They feel like a family. And that’s important because beneath the veneer of goofy Furby monsters rolling around like ravenous Sonic the Hedgehogs, there is a story of reconciliation and family appreciation. There’s a beating heart here, not just nonsense for the hell of it. We’ll never know if dad got space rabies from all the Krite bites that poor man took, but we do find out that aliens perfected the rewind button.

In a terrific display of simple special effects, an alien device puts the Brown farmhouse back together again. It’s the perfect visual metaphor for this cult classic to end on. CRITTERS might not have the meanest bite, but its glorious mix of lo-fi puppetry and irreverent attitude makes it top-notch weekend entertainment.