Gremlins (1984)

I saw Gremlins in the theater with my brother and my aunt while on a trip back to my birthplace of Syracuse, New York.  That factoid has no relevance other than it reminds me that I have that pointless ability to remember where I was whenever I first watched a movie in a theater. 

This was one of those movies that HBO repeated for years on their service back when it was the only way to watch a movie.  Even so, I think I only rewatched it once or twice.  Not that it was bad, because I remember it being fun.  I just think that even at the age of 12 or 13, I got the gist. I also never liked the chocolate of schlocky movies getting mixed with the peanut butter of Christmas.

Is Gremlins a Christmas movie?  It’s about a Christmas present given a few days before Christmas and the setting is snowy with trees and lights and mirth.  So, yeah. I guess, but barely. It’s also one of the only Christmas movies I can recall that features a hellish monster exploding in a microwave.  Gremlins is as you remember it.  Cheap, kinda slow, kinda corny, kinda fun.  That’s not what I walked away with.  It made me think of how savvy we’ve become as audiences in the twenty-first century.

Also…the monologue…

If you recall the gremlin rules, the mogwai creature has to avoid sunlight, can’t get wet, and can’t eat after midnight.  When you’re a kid in the 80’s you take this shit as gospel.  E.T can fly, the flux capacitor makes time travel possible, a lightsaber is light that stops in midair for some reason.  But as an adult whose seen 10,000 movies and TV shows, and for modern-day kids with a critical eye, even the corny set-up is ridiculous.

Avoiding sunlight?  Okay.  Vampire rules.  Solid.  Understood.

Can’t get them wet?  How on Earth did any creature evolve that couldn’t even get wet?  Water is nearly impossible to avoid! Do they drink?  They can’t be in the rain?  Do they have tear ducts?  Getting them wet spawned new creatures who are instantly adult versions of mogwai. It’s a plot device that turns one cute mogwai named Gizmo into hundreds of gremlins in two nights. When I was a kid, I thought about them running through the snow.  Does the snow count as water?  Shouldn’t they be constantly giving birth in December?

If the water thing was hard enough to comprehend, how about feeding them after midnight?  Again, as a kid, it was sound logic.  ‘Makes sense to me, Hollywood!’  But after midnight?  What time zone?  Do you have to factor in Daylight Savings? My dog knows when its time to eat, but down to the second?  How would you know?  How would they know?  It’s probably not fair to rewrite after the fact, but how about making it so they aren’t allowed to eat a specific thing?  Don’t feed them eggnog. Don’t feed them chocolate.  Don’t feed them meat.  If they eat meat, they go nuts, turn into bloodthirsty gremlins and madness ensues.

Like that monologue.  Holy shit.  

I also do not understand why so many movies featured a bland, white, sexless, naïve, dumbass protagonist.  We live in America, I know.  I get the white guy thing for the 1980’s especially.  But do they have to be so friggin’ lame? It’s movie and TV production theory that is still around today.  You are supposed to put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes, so he can’t be too much of anything.  Not too ethnic, not too smart, not too rich or too poor, just not anything.  The problem is that’s not how you make a character memorable.  It’s just the opposite.  Stripe, the evil gremlin leader with the mohawk and the attitude and the gun is memorable.  Billy, our hero, is not.

And now, the reason everyone remembers this movie.  It has nothing to do with monsters but everything to do with some sick freak who wrote the script.  The scene is this: The ever-lovely Phoebe Cates is on the run with our forgettable hero and thy hide out in a bank.  She waits about four seconds and launches into a monologue that details the reason she hates Christmas.  I’ll just throw it in here in its entirety because it is so messed up that I don’t want to ruin its effect.  This is a dark comedy, or a holiday horror movie, with crazy kills and green gremlin goo galore. I can only imagine they needed one more stab at the American Christmas spirit and to fuck up the minds of any youngsters who dared to watch.

“The worst thing that ever happened to me was on Christmas. Oh, God. It was so horrible. It was Christmas Eve. I was 9 years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. A couple of hours went by. Dad wasn’t home. So Mom called the office. No answer. Christmas Day came and went and still nothing. So the police began a search. Four or five days went by. Neither one of us could eat or sleep. Everything was falling apart. It was snowing outside. The house was freezing, so I went to try to light up the fire. And that’s when I noticed the smell. The firemen came and broke through the chimney top. And me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird. And instead they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He’d been climbing down the chimney on Christmas Eve, his arms loaded with presents. He was gonna surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck. He died instantly. And that’s how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”

 Merry Christmas!