For this year’s sixth entry, it’s the movie that popularized the urban legend of dad dressing as Santa Claus and breaking his neck coming down the chimney: Gremlins!
A boy receives a strange creature as a Christmas gift with 3 specific rules: don’t get it wet, don’t feed it after midnight, and don’t expose it to the sun. As the rules get broken, malevolent creatures start raining havoc upon a small town on Christmas Eve.
Do I need to say anything about this movie? It’s Gremlins! You know Gremlins! We all know Gremlins! Remember all the different gremlins? You’re thinking of Gremlins 2: The New Batch. This is the one with a gremlin exploding in the microwave.
Gremlins is a holiday staple for me and an interesting one in that I always forget and am surprised by the details. I forget that Billy’s dad is an inventor. I forget about the opening scene in Chinatown that feels… let’s say “dicey.” Even though I bought my copy specifically because it’s a Christmas movie, I even forget that it all happens on Christmas Eve.
However, the most surprising thing I forget is just how well constructed and executed the movie is. It almost never puts a foot wrong.
Now, because this is the Internet, I will proceed to note, and only note, all the times it puts a foot wrong.
Honestly, there are only two. The first is the Chinatown sequence where the dad is trying to sell the shopkeeper the Bathroom Buddy. On this rewatch, I was immediately cringing because the movie opens in Chinatown and was shot in 1984. It has to be bad, right?
And it’s not, (except for the gong sound when the dad says “dragon breath.” That’s an immediately and obvious, “no”). The kid who leads him to the shop doesn’t have some terrible accent and, while the store is stocked with a host of “Oriental” items, the movie doesn’t seem to be using any of them to make a joke. Instead, like the scene later in the movie when the dad calls from the inventors’ conference and the background is filled with references to classic sci-fi, the shop—and the shopkeeper—feel like homages to the aesthetics of the Chinatowns that only ever existed in Fu-Manchu and Charlie Chan films. Which is why I said it feels “dicey.” The movie is making references to an aesthetic that was being racist. It’s nostalgic for those images without considering their meaning. To put it another way, the filmmakers weren’t trying to say anything with that scene, but they wouldn’t think or want to do that scene today.
The other point where the movie puts a foot wrong is Billy taking the dog to the bank at the start of the movie. He ties the dog up under the counter, his Scrooge-surrogate neighbor comes in to threaten the dog, and it jumps out and attacks her.
Let’s start with the last point first: the dog attacks her. I’m a dog person. I prefer dogs to people. She’s clearly a monster by the way she threatens the dog. But it attacks her in a public place without provocation. When Santa does exactly what the villain of Miracle on 34th Street says he would do, it’s justified and the culmination of a serious of provocations. Here, the dog is proving the villain right. It is dangerous and Billy is not being a responsible dog owner.
Which leads to the first point: why did Billy bring the dog to work? It’s 1984. You don’t bring your pets to work. Plus it seems like his mom is at home all day so there isn’t even a concern about the dog being left alone.
Of course, it’s all there to move the plot along and the movie is done well enough that it took me 35 years to go, “Hey… waitaminute.” It’s part of Dante’s broader aesthetic of nodding to other movies. I said the villain was Scrooge-like since she controls the mortgages of much of the town and is unconcerned about a family’s financial difficulties around Christmas. She also directly invokes the Wicked Witch of the West when she says she’ll get his little dog, too. And there are hints of Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life in her controlling the finances of the town without any concern for the effects she might have on the community.
One element that stood out on this watch were the references to economic desperation. Dad’s inventions are never finding a buyer, the neighbor is unemployed and slipping into depression, the love interest moonlights as a waitress at the local bar for free because the owner can’t afford to hire someone, and there is a family asking both the villain and the bank manager to not evict them on Christmas. The only character that seems to be doing well is Judge Reinhold, the smarmy vice-president at the bank who fails to woo the love interest with his 1984 luxuries—cable TV. Curiously, he doesn’t get killed. You’d expect that since he makes such a strong impression with his first appearance as a smarmy scumbag that he’d have an on-screen death, but he doesn’t reappear in the movie after that.
I don’t know that the economics play any part in the story, but they do speak to the quality of the film and its attention to detail. The world is lived-in and the characters are facing struggles even before the supernatural challenge arises. It’s one of the reasons the movie is so satisfying to return to—it is, in fact, a place that you can return to.
5/5 Christmas lights that are secretly eyes oh no!
Gremlins is currently available to stream on HBOMax
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