Still Hungry

The tiny monster genre was, for a time, huge. This is something we’ve discussed before, over on my review of the first Critters film, so I don’t feel the need to get too deep in the weeds on it again. Suffice it to say that the success of the first Gremlins movie ushered in a wave of other little monster films that lasted for most of the 1980s. Some were great, like Gremlins, some were awful, like Troll, and some were just patently strange, like Gremlins 2, but for a brief time these films could find something on the order of success and make decent little buckets of bank at the Box Office.

Hell, even Roger Corman got in on the action with the 1987 film Munchies and the later, unrelated “comedy” film Munchie, and when Roger Corman started making films in a genre, you know it had reached its peak.

Still, every genre runs its course, and as soon as these movies became hits they were almost as quickly beaten into the ground. You can directly point to the Critters franchise in helping this along, making a bunch of cheap, low-budget mini-monster films in a short span until every last bit of fun, and every dollar, had been sucked from the marrow of the franchise. Hell, the first Critters was a barely watchable Gremlins clone. We didn’t need a sequel. But because it did well enough ($13 Mil on a $3 Mil budget, plus cable licensing money and home video sales), a sequel was inevitable. Two years later a second was forced upon us, Critters 2: The Main Course, and audiences were already bored.

Released two years after the first film, in 1988, Critters 2: The Main Course sees kid hero Brad Brown (Scott Grimes) returning home to Grover’s Bend after his family was chased out of town for their stories of “little space monsters”. Despite the carnage wrought the previous time, no one now believes him or his family and they treat them all like they’re crazy, or liars, or both. But wouldn’t you know it, the same time that young Brad returns home, a stash of Crit eggs is discovered by a couple of local kooks. They take the eggs, thinking they can sell them for a quick buck, and get sold they do, to Brad’s grandmother, who everyone calls Nana (Herta Ware), so she can use them in the church’s Easter Egg Hunt.

It’s not even a day later that the eggs start to hatch, and suddenly all of Grover’s Bend is once again infested with the meat-eating monsters from beyond the stars. Thankfully, to help the crew in their quest to fight the aliens, bounty hunters Ug (Terrence Mann) and Lee (Roxanne Kernohan) along with former town drunk turned space bounty hunter assistant Charlie (Don Keith Opper), return from space to finish the job they started in the first movie. It’s bounty hunters versus flesh-eating creatures in this lame and tired sequel.

Critters 2: The Main Course is a standard kind of sequel. This one buys into the formula of, “if audiences liked this, why not give them more of what they liked.” It doesn’t try to do anything better, or fancier, or different. It’s not Gremlins 2 in that respect, which at least had the audacity to crank the inherent silliness and weirdness of its monsters all the way up past 11. No, the Critters sequel does exactly what you expect from a sequel, just barely enough to get by with any of the original actors that are willing to return for this sad affair.

A big problem with the sequel is that it doesn’t have anything original to do or say about the creatures. They were evil, flesh-eating beasts the first time, and they’re evil, flesh-eating beasts the second time. They go through the same motions, doing the same things, and providing a minimal amount of gore in the process, until the time limit on the film runs out. The gore is at least decent, but there aren’t really any scares in the material. It’s just some blood, some grime, and then the film moves on.

A big problem is, once again, the critters themselves. These are supposed to be evil, ravenous beasts, but the puppets for the critters aren’t all that involved, detailed, or maneuverable. They aren’t like the far more involved armatures that worked the gremlins. These beasts are basically hand puppets in one form, and giant furballs that get rolled in another. The lack of joints and maneuverability means there’s only so much that can be done with the creature effects, so either the humans have to stumble on the critters, or the critters roll up to the humans. That’s literally it. The scariness of this, whatever there might have been, was already worn out by the first movie. This one is just dreadfully dull.

There also aren’t any surprises when it comes to the heroes. We already know Brad and Charlie, and they both effectively have no arc in this movie. Brad was the hero kid at the end of the last film, and the movie sets him back so that he can re-earn his spot again in this film. Meanwhile Charlie… well, is just Charlie. He coasts, and while he ends up in a new place at the end of this film, it doesn’t really feel earned or needed. He’s a waste of space in this film, back only because he was cheap and anyone better wouldn’t sign on.

As for the other bounty hunters, it’s hard to be surprised by them when we already know what they can do. They walk around, they shapeshift into various people they see, and they kill crits. They have no arc, and they exhibit no new behavior at all. If Brad and Charlie are just treading water, the bounty hunters are absolutely stuck in the mud this time around. It would have been better, long run, if the critters didn’t deal with any of the characters we already knew and, instead, had a new cast in Grover’s Bend to deal with. They, at the very least, we could have had new character arcs and new things going on that we could have focused on.

What this all really means is that Critters 2: The Main Course is barely a real movie on its own. Instead it fabricates a retcon to the previous film – that, somehow, the critters laid eggs in the first movie and now those eggs are about to hatch – so that it can add an addendum onto what we already saw. Nothing of value is added and nothing new is revealed. It’s just more of the same from the previous movie, and as we noted then, the whole concept was already stretched thin after a single outing. A sequel was not needed.

In fact, the only thing added to this film that the previous movie lacked, was more gore and some titillation. There’s a gratuitous boob shot for no reason in this film, included simply to appease its teenage fans and skirt along the PG-13 rating, and it has just enough blood to almost qualify as horror. None of it is strictly needed, per se, but it does make sure this film was just mature enough that the little kids who saw the first film probably wouldn’t be allowed to see the sequel. Can’t let little Jane and Jimmy see these naughty bits.

Honestly, this is just such a mind bogglingly terrible film I have to wonder who thought it was a good idea to even greenlight it. It’s boring, it’s tired, and it’s just plain sad. Any fans of the first film (were there any?) had to have been disappointed by this sequel. It does the bare minimum to exist and almost nothing more.