Dante and Spielberg just couldn't resist the urge.

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2013)

A big hit when it came out, "Gremlins" has stood the test of time quite well. There's a visual quality and mood to the movie that makes it a cut above many such fantasy-based 80s films, some of which look decidedly dated by now. The creatures look real and behave in an interesting/amusing rather than predictable way.
Those of us who enjoyed it as kids back then can now "appreciate" its subversive nature – at least people that are clueless naive liberals in search of the millionth movie to feature an anti-Capitalist message. (Actually, 1,000,000 might be more of a low estimate. Check out my "Left-Wing Propaganda in TV & Cinema" list for more on this.) This anti-American message is so subliminal, so obscured by the thick layers of the movie's Disney-wise cartoon-like shenanigans, that it can only be detected by those who pay attention to such things, i.e. viewers who are fully aware of how rampant left-wing propaganda was/is/always-will-be in American (but also European) movies. The fact that Joe Dante and Stevie Spielberg were director and producer, respectively, makes perfect sense inasmuch that they're both flaming closet Marxists.
What doesn't make sense at all is that those two joined up and actually gave us a quality product. Spielberg had said "au revoir" to quality after "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), whereas Dante had only ever made one very good movie – this one. "The Howling" and "Gremlins 2" are merely solid, the rest of his filmography ranges from mediocre to utterly commercial pap.
What's left-wing about it?
1) The town's witch/ogre is also its richest person (rich people are evil, unless they happen to be Communist dictators or Beverly Hills leftists, in which case they are noble and perfect); a woman more than happy to render as many people homeless in her town as she can, plus she's the widow of a stock-market millionaire – and we know how very evil Wall Street and anything even remotely associated with profit-making is (unless of course a Hollywood film-maker is making millions of profit: that doesn't count). (Btw, her character is a shameless rip-off (or "tribute", ha ha) of the evil witch from "Wizard of Oz".)
2) The Chinaman (whose own country is Communist; I don't know whether this was intentional or whether it was the "exotic bonus" they were after) scolds the all-American family, giving them a brief but stern lecture as to why they do not deserve to have a wonderful creature such as the "mogwai", because, in the Chinaman's words: "your society isn't ready for it". In other words, American society is too evil, what with its free democratic society and a successful Capitalist system that had enabled it to become among the wealthiest countries in the world (a fact that far-Left liberals like Spielberg and other like-minded Hollywood chums of his simply can't stomach – in spite of the fact that HIS career is as Capitalist in nature as Henry Ford's!).
3) When the sheriff makes a comment about how patriotic Gizmo is, he misses out on the way in which the little critter was playing with the American flag – namely with a touch of disgust.
Fortunately, the laughable political messages of the three deranged men involved with the movie's script, direction and production is too hidden to ruin the entertainment value.