A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness

The perfect follow-up to the mixed media delight of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (so lovingly remembered in last week’s piece by Julie) for the pre-Christmas season, in my mind, is clearly the most insane, self-referential sequel of them all!

There is definitely something off-kilter about Gremlins 2: The New Batch from the beginning: the Warner Bros. logo segues into a rather insane version of a Looney Tunes cartoon, complete with Daffy Duck unceremoniosuly pushing Bugs Bunny out of the spotlight and consequently crashing the logo itself in the process. We might already suspect that the hostile takeover foreshadows what is awaiting us in the following two hours or so, with a fresh batch of Gremlins pushing themselves into the spotlight of New York City.

The actual title sequence takes us across the city skyline of th early 1990s, complete with the World Trade Center and into the familiar dusty backstore in Chinatown, where cute little Gremin Gizmo once again awaits new adventures. The original Gremlins (1984), an incredibly successful mix of creature horror, family Christmas and small town satire by Roger Corman-raised director Joe Dante (Piranha), had seen Gizmo brought home for the holidays by business man Peltzer and then bring unintentional havoc to the family and town by spawning a batch of nasty monsters from too much feeding after midnight and exposure to light and water (rules one, two and three in the book of how not to treat Gremlins).

This sequel only fleetingly harks back to the original, though: We do meet the protagonists of the original again, Zac Galligan as Billy Peltzer and Phoebe Cates as his girlfriend Kate, but they have since moved to the Big Apple to pursue their respective career at Clamp Tower, a massively modern business temple of advanced technology owned by a self-absorbed real estate developer who plans to redevelop the entire city to flatter his massive ego.

Sound familiar? Clamp is indeed a very thinly veiled mix between Donald Trump and CNN uber-boss Ted Turner, and his questionable business empire certainly pokes massive fun at the malfunction of Clamp’s plan for city-wide domination and his hunger for media attention. Unsurprisngly, it’s the broken water fountain that sets off the second coming of the Gremlins in the first third of the film. Before that, we have already met an ambitious femme fatale Marla Bloodstone (Haviland Morris, in a nod to film noir perhaps?), Clamp himself (John Glover) and a sinister Professor aptly named Catheter (horror legend Christopher Lee), who gladly develops new species into incredible mutations: gargoyles, spiders, femme fatales, you name it, all of which the Gremlins will gladly try out!

Twenty minutes into the film, we know that the fresh batch of Gremlins is not only unstoppable but we feel something unexpected is happening: instead of going for any horror or suspense, Gremlins 2 turns into an insane catalogue of pop culture references and satirical jabs at New York, its over-ambitious wannabe inhabitants and some remotely sane protagonists trying to save the day.

In the process, the Clamp office building doesn’t only satirise the technological inventions of a business world gone crazy, it also houses some of the sets for a range of hilarious Gremlins attacks: the boozed-up cooking show host of Marge’s Microwave (Kathleen Freeman) gets some very unwelcome extra monster chefs joining her, and the building’s security team, after poking fun at our Billy Peltzer for believing in gremlins, are viciously attacked in a relentless monster onslaught. Yellow slime and green guts are everywhere in this frivolous display of special effects, particularly when Gremlins get electrocuted, shreddered or fried in various scenes.

This could be the recipe for absolute movie disaster, but the joyful anarchy is the very concept of Gremlins 2: instead of opting for the trusted formula of copying whatever the original did well and doing that again, the movie dares to be an insanely anarchic fun ride. In the process, the movie unveils the most absurd developments of New York-typified American dreams of the time: incredible greed, unstoppable vanity and insatiable hunger for success. The little green monsters are merely like these yuppies on steroids, just as greedy, vain and hungry as their human counterparts – a sort of Wall Street of creature horror.

In one incredible mutation, one of the Gremlins develops an excess of brain cells and starts to give interviews to a baffled scary-movie presenter (Robert Prosky) about the intentions and ambitions of the Gremlins species now taking over Clamp Tower, then Manhattan, then the world. It’s up to our protagonists to stop them with all tricks of the trade, eventually assembling all of them in the lobby, spraying them with water so they start mutating once again but then electrocuting them in a truly sparkling finale. But all this only after a splendid rendition of our talking Gremlin crooning “New York, New York”.

Gremlins 2 certainly is a movie of its day, yet a wonderful spoof of American business excesses in the wake of ‘winning’ the Cold War, and a splendid display of special effects-movie making that mixes all imaginable media at its disposal: the cartoon opening, stop-motion gargoyles and gremlins, massive amounts of puppeteering, creature design and elaborate composite shots – just before everything turned digital. All is held expertly held together by Jerry Goldsmith’s self-ironic score, drawing both on his trusted Gremlins theme but finding ways to infuse every scene with self-referential nods to adventure (even his own Rambo score), horror and comedy. Goldsmith (among many others) even makes a cameo appearance in the Clamp lobby at one point. Of all the pre-Christmas musical delights, Goldsmith’s two Gremlins scores are musts on my not-so-festive playlist.

Towards the end of the film, Gremlins have even taken control of the film itself, melting the film strip in the projection booth and making shadow play behind an empty screen. It takes Hulk Hogan himself, dutifully asked by an anonymous usher among us the audience, to threaten the mean monsters into starting the projection again. It’s that fourth-wall-breaking madness that endeared critics (confused audiences less so) at the time and showed more than one middle finger to Hollywood’s expectations about a lucrative sequel. Joe Dante was apparently most happy not to comply!

Needless to say that come the Holiday season, even a smooch-hungry Gremlins lady couldn’t keep me from going back to one of the most insane, most fun and least calculated movie sequels I’m aware of!

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