Cast:
Dee Wallace (Helen Brown), M. Emmet Walsh (Harvey), Billy Green Bush (Jay Brown), Scott Grimes (Brad Brown), Nadine van der Velde (April Brown), Don Keith Opper (Charlie McFadden), Lin Shaye (Sally), Billy Zane (Steve Elliot), Ethan Phillips (Jeff Barnes), Terrence Mann (Ug / Johnny Steele), with Jeremy Lawrence (Reverend Miller / Preacher), and Corey Burton (the voices of the Krites) Directed by Stephen Herek (#021 - Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, #502 - Man of the House, #868 - The Mighty Ducks)
Review:
It may interest you to know that the movie wasn't exactly just riding off the coat tails of Gremlins as the other movie of little creatures wreaking havoc in a town before being confronted all the way to hell. Dominic Muir came up with the first draft of the story in September 1981 (the same time that the original spec script for the aforementioned Gremlins had been first finished). At the time, he was an Oregon teenager that liked movies and dreaming of going to Los Angeles to try and make it in movies. He liked sci-fi and horror, so he basically conjured up a tribute to "The Zanti Misfits" for his space convict focus. However, it languished in storage for a number of years before he came across Stephen Herek while working together as assistant editors on City Limits (1985). The San Antonio native had aspired to play baseball at the University of Texas at Austin before taking film classes when baseball didn't work out that had him hooked (he didn't get to do the senior filmmaking class, but he still set forth for Hollywood and grinded away). Herek worked on the script and soon pitched it to Sho Films, who wanted to develop it further that became Herek's feature film debut. Don Opper contributed to some of the dialogue, although he was not given credit at the time. Eventually, the movie was distributed by New Line Cinema for release in the summer of 1986. The movie was a mild success with audiences and led to a direct sequel with Critters 2: The Main Course (released in 1988, with Grimes, Opper, Mann, and Shaye each returning) and three direct-to-video sequels along with a TV show. Muir wrote a variety of stuff before dying from complications of a brain tumor in 2010.
I suppose one light creature feature is worth a good curious time. Sure, it lacks a body-count besides seeing a few exploding critters (and, well, a few harmed/knocked out others), but there's a good deal of fun to be had with its key threat (with designs by the Chiodo brothers) and a spry cast of charming people dealing with mayhem to make up for it. The mayhem is a bit two-fold here, as setup through its opening sequence to detail the fact that there are some destructive little bastards (Krites, specifically) on the loose and that the only people ready to stop them are shape-changing bounty hunters that like to study human faces from TV (and later on, up-and-personal contact) and like to achieve their mission at all costs. You get a pleasing enough quartet (Wallace-Bush-Grimes-van Der Velde) that seem like people worth believing would match together when the chips are down and the town needs some thinking besides the usual domestic dilly-dallying. The townsfolk are quirky enough (ol' reliable Walsh provides probably not enough presence, but he's always welcome) to lead to some humor without turning everything into one-note dreariness, mostly with Opper and his wayward spirit as both an eccentric *and* an important person when actually needing to rise to the occasion. The creatures are delightfully loathsome enough in their hunger for anything and everything that they want to do (even taking out an E.T. doll). There's even a tiny bit of suspense when getting that first setup of the family encountering the critters and the poisonous quills before inevitably getting into "blow stuff up" territory. I do give credit for the ending for deciding, yes, sometimes you can just cheat to make everything end up happily ever after. It's the kind of movie you watch along with, say, Tremors (1990) and go with the flow. A goofy little sci-fi horror comedy, Critters crawls its way towards the finish line with most of the right notes required to garner a place worth recommending at the bare minimum, which is more than can be said for other movies.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
November 7: As per tradition, a double header to close out Halloween: The Week After. As such: Planet of the Vampires.
