Pretty Grewsome for a comedy.

Rating: 3/10 (16 March 2019)

This is another one of those films that I remember from the 80s, and it is also one that I haven't seen for quite a while so I thought that I might watch it again, if only to see if I remember all that much about it. Honestly, after watching it so long after it was released all I have to say is that this film is basically brain mush, nothing more, nothing less. Actually, to be more specific, in many ways it really doesn't seem to know what it really wants to be.
That is this problem with this film, and that is that it is trying to be two types of films that just contrast with each other too much - that is a horror, and a comedy. The reason I say that is that in comedies, characters aren't really supposed to die, and if they do die, they are supposed to die in absolutely absurd ways. This isn't the case with this film - the characters that die, die in a way as they would die in any old horror movie.
However, the antagonists, the Gremlins, make this film feel like a comedy, especially all of the antics that they get up to. Then there is the final confrontation with Spike, and that really seems to come down as if it was a serious confrontation with a serious villain from a serious film, not some film that basically has a bunch of puppets running around causing mayhem and chaos.
This brings me to another problem that I have with this film, and that is whether it is the question of whether it is a kid's movie or not - in part it feels like it is, particularly with the cute looking Mogwai, and another with the gremlins, who are pretty comical in their antics. However, the other issue is that, well, characters die, and that isn't something that I feel belongs in a kid's movie. Sure, characters do die in kid's movie - see Bambi for instance - but they tend to be quite emotional, which is not the case here, since they simply die as if it were a horror film.
What the film does well though is with the Gremlins. As they flag at the beginning of the film, Gremlins are basically creatures that get into devices and cause all sorts of problems. This is what they do, and what they do rather well. Yet, as I mentioned, there does seem to be some really dark aspects to this film that doesn't sit all that well with the craziness of the Gremlins. Oh, I could also mention the completely unscientific means of how they reproduce and transform, but that is being just a little bit too picky, and sometimes we simply need to let movies be movies, no matter how silly the premise.