Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
★★½ — Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Six years after the original Gremlins (1984) became one of the defining hits of the Amblin Entertainment era, Joe Dante returned for a sequel that he reportedly agreed to make only on the condition that he had near-total creative freedom, a condition Warner Bros. accepted. The result is a film that turns its own existence into the joke, functioning less as a straight sequel and more as a self-aware parody of franchise filmmaking and 1980s corporate excess. Dante, who had spent the intervening years on Explorers (1985) and The 'Burbs (1989), was given a $50 million budget, a considerable step up, though the film recouped only around $41 million at the domestic box office, making it a notable commercial disappointment relative to its predecessor's enormous success.
There’s no denying that Gremlins 2 is technically an upgrade from the original, the animatronics are more advanced, the creature designs wilder and more inventive, and the puppetry work from Chris Walas’ team is genuinely impressive. The gremlins themselves are more expressive, more varied, and unleashed in a gleefully chaotic high-rise laboratory and office block, giving the film a slicker, more modern playground than the sleepy town of the first. The effects hold up better in some ways, it’s clear more money and imagination went into the madness. But where the original had a tight balance of horror, humour, and heart, Gremlins 2 leans so hard into cartoonish absurdity that it stops feeling like a movie and starts feeling like a theme park ride with a script. Talking gremlins, a spider-gremlin hybrid, a gremlin that turns into a movie monster mid-scene, it’s all so over-the-top, so relentlessly wacky, that any sense of tension or danger evaporates. The film even breaks the fourth wall, with characters commenting on the violence and the screen going blank as if the projector broke. It’s clever in theory, but it undercuts any emotional investment. Also kudos for Hulk Hogan. The human cast (including Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates) are given little to do but react to the chaos, and while John Glover makes a memorably eccentric villain, he’s too silly to be threatening. The satire of corporate culture and media is there, but it’s buried under too many gags and too much noise. It’s not a bad film, in fact, it’s often fun to watch, with a kind of anarchic energy that’s hard to hate. But it’s too silly, too self-aware, too unserious to ever feel satisfying. A spectacle of puppetry and madness, yes, but the soul of the original is long gone, replaced by a circus. Better effects, worse balance.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1990 | Watched: 2025-08-05
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Joe Dante: Gremlins (1984)
More with Zach Galligan: Rising Storm (1989) · Gremlins (1984)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
