Monster Christmas

Rating: 5/10 (29 December 2012)

I've been seeking out some Christmas related films I'd not seen before and wondering why my wife to this day still utters "Bright lights" when ever a room is lit up suddenly and talks about "Gizmo eyes", I decided to follow her recommendation and watch it with her.
I'm broadly aware of Joe Dante's reputation for spoof monster flicks and to be fair, I'll cut him some slack for mashing up a cutesy Christmas movie supposedly centring on a teenage boy's predilection for unusual and cuddly pets with a vintage monster movie with lots of outlandish and ghoulish deaths along the way. The film just about works by switching between the two modes at will, keeping the viewer on the hop all the time, indeed he serves notice of his intentions by interspersing classic film clips of quite different movies, "It's A Wonderful Life" and "Them" for instance.
Although many of the attack scenes are plain silly, like when Billy's mother takes on four Gremlins in her kitchen and especially the demise of Mrs Deagle which must have set back the sales of chairlifts at the time, Dante generally gets away with mixing up the goofy with the gore, even if to me the Gremlins themselves looked no more dangerous than Animal from "The Muppets".
A strange mixture then but perhaps not a movie to play for the very young on Christmas Eve.