Gremlins (1984)

There's a moment in Gremlins where a sweet, doe-eyed little creature called Gizmo gets splashed with water, and everything you thought this film was going to be gets tossed straight out the window. That shift, from warm Christmas fable to gleeful chaos, is exactly what makes Gremlins the kind of film people still talk about four decades on. It doesn't quite fit anywhere, and that's precisely the point.

This is a proper 80s classic. Funny, cheeky, and surprisingly dark in ways you don't always see coming. It mixes Christmas charm with creature horror and broad slapstick in a way that really shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does. Gizmo is an absolute icon. Those big eyes, that gentle nature, the way he sits there looking utterly adorable while everything falls apart around him. He's the perfect cuddly companion, and the film knows it. The whole setup relies on you loving him before the rules get broken, because once they do, the cute gives way to the grotesque pretty fast.

And the grotesque is where Gremlins earns its reputation. There's a microwave scene. A blender scene. Fingers getting bitten off. For a film aimed at a broad audience, it pushed things further than anyone expected, and the fallout was real: it's one of the films credited with helping bring about the PG-13 rating in the States. That's a legacy, whether you find the gory bits funny or genuinely unsettling. I find them both, which is probably the right response.

The practical effects are clearly showing their age now, but I mean that with some affection. There's a handmade energy to the gremlins, a physicality to them, that CGI creatures often lack. You can feel the craft in them, even when the seams are visible. It's the kind of ingenuity that makes old genre films worth revisiting even when they can't compete technically with what came after.

It's not a perfect film, though, and I won't pretend otherwise. Some of the jokes haven't aged especially well, and the plot is predictable from fairly early on. More than that, the gremlins themselves, fun as they are, mostly just exist to wreck things. They cause havoc in a small town with a mix of cartoonish gags and genuine menace, but there's not a great deal of cleverness or surprise in what they actually do. The mayhem is entertaining, but it rarely builds to anything more than itself.

Still, there's heart underneath all of it. That's what separates Gremlins from a lot of the horror-comedies it helped inspire. It has warmth, even when it's being grotesque. It has a genuine fondness for its small-town setting and the people in it. And it commits to its own strange tone with real confidence, bold enough to go too far and unafraid of the consequences.

I've since watched Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), which takes everything wilder and weirder and more self-aware, and it's a fascinating contrast. The original feels almost quaint by comparison, and I mean that warmly.

Three stars. A cult classic for good reason, even if it very much looks its age. Worth every minute of it.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1984  | Watched: 2025-07-26

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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