Los Angeles Blues

Did we need more Critters? Having just watched Gremlins 2: The New Batch, a Warner Bros. film that took that franchise just about as far as it could go in every direction, I have to wonder just what mini-monster movies can really do with themselves once the mini-monsters are introduced. Gremlins 2, as overblown and over-the-top as it is, isn’t content to just deliver the same movie as its predecessor. It goes bigger, it goes bolder, and it tries to do everything it can to be the ultimate Gremlins film. Is it any good? Well, good isn’t the right term, but it is insanely watchable. It’s hard to hate a film that goes for broke like that.

But then when I came back and watched Critters 3, I was left with a film that’s smaller, dumber, and nowhere near as interesting as its two predecessors. Not that Critters or Critters 2: The Main Course are even very good films – they already felt like watered down versions of Gremlins – but the lack of ambition on display in Critters 3 is astounding. It’s a direct-to-video film that barely even tries at all. I’m not saying it needed to be a $50 Mil boondoggle like Gremlins 2, but it would have been nice to see some ambition, some spark of something. This is a barely there, milquetoast monster film released simply to keep a name no one cared about going.

But why? Why does Critters 3 even exist? If you look at raw numbers, Critters 2: The Main Course was an abject failure. It only managed to bring in $3.8 Mil against its tiny, $4 Mil budget, so there was no real call for a sequel to arrive, especially one as unambitious as this. But what we have to remember is home video sales. In 1988, when the second film was released, home video sales were becoming big business. Between buyers at home and rental places picking up stock for their shelves, video sales grew to be a massive part of a studio’s bottom line. Even a cruddy film with name recognition could pull in $10 Mil or more in video sales. When you slap that on top of the haul for Critters 2, suddenly a dud film becomes kind of profitable.

Which then naturally leads to why Critters (like so many other failed horror franchises) went to home video. VHS sales made up more of its ticket value than theatrical releases. Hell, sales for Critters 3 were reportedly solid, letting the film make upwards of $13 Mil in sales off a meager $2 Mil budget. That’s close to the same haul as its direct predecessor. This explains why we got a third film and also why none of the cast, outside of Don Keith Opper’s Charlie MacFadden, bothered coming back for this outing. But we did get Leonardo DiCaprio in his very first film. I guess that counts for something.

We’re introduced to our new characters – father Clifford (John Calvin), teen daughter Annie (Aimee Brooks), and young son Johnny (Christian and Joseph Cousins) – as they’re driving back from the Grand Canyon in an old, beat up RV. Annie is upset because her father has to go back to work on the train line after their vacation, and he’ll be gone for days, even weeks at a time. But that’s the job he has, and ever since their mother died it’s been hard for him to think of doing anything else. This vacation was a last hurrah for them before the real world kicks back in.

A flat tire forces them to make a rest stop, and while there Annie meets Josh (Leonardo DiCaprio), the stepson of a pretty shitty guy, Briggs (William Dennis Hunt). They go off to play, but while searching for a frisbee they end up meeting Charlie (Don Keith Opper), who tells them a crazy story about space aliens (aka, the first two films). While the kids are playing and their dad fixes the tire, critters roll up and grab hold of his vehicle, laying eggs in the undercarriage. That way, when the RV gets back to their shitty, rundown apartment building, the critters can hatch and terrorize a new group of people. It’s fun for the whole family!

The thing about Critters 3 is that, deep down, there’s probably some version of this film that could have been good. It would have required more money, and a better script, and a production team that cared, yes, but I think a good movie could have been made out of the bones of this. A family, dealing with grief, is forced to confront their emotional demons when faced with actual demons from outer space. I can see some writer going, “hell yeah, that’s a metaphor, man!” before high-fiving his friends. It’s a good start to a film.

And, to their credit, the cast actually does a pretty good job. These are all B- and C-list actors, of course (even Leo at the time since this was his first film and he’d only done a handful of guest spots on various TV shows before this), but they turn in solid, credible performances. Given a script that wasn’t trash, and production crew that really cared, I think they could have actually done a lot to sell the material in a way that made you care about the movie. Unlike a lot of terrible films, Critters 3 is not in any way the fault of the actors.

No, it’s everything else about this film that sucks. For starters, the script is bad. A family goes on vacation and they happen to be forced to take a pit stop at a rest area that their landlord, that they somehow don’t know and have never met, is also stopped at, only to then also get a group of random aliens attached to their RV, bringing them back to the shitty apartment building, and then the landlord show up there, too, to terrorize them. Like… it’s all just too many coincidences and logic jumps to work on any level. And we’re just supposed to accept it because the film never comments otherwise.

I get that the RV has to stop and that’s a convenient point for the critters to climb on. They didn’t need to lay their eggs on the undercarriage, which seems like a pretty good way to ensure they all break, but still. But for their landlord to be there, and they don’t know him and he doesn’t know them at all, that seems silly. Charlie also shows up, at the same rest stop, making everyone wonder if this is some magic convergence point for C-list actors. I do understand the reason why the writer, David J. Schow, did this: introduce all the characters early, let us meet the good guys and the bad guy. Have dynamics set. But it would have been just as easy to set everything at the apartment building. Have Josh be a kid Annie knows. Have him keep the secret that his step-dad is the landlord. You don’t need all this happenstance to make it all work.

And how do the critters get there? Who cares?! They just show up. We didn’t need much explanation the first two times when the critters just arrived. Some survived the second film, they caught a ride on a burger truck to L.A., and then rolled off at the apartment building. Two sentences of explanation that saves all the convenience and silliness of this film. Why the story twists itself into knots when the easiest solution (and, frankly, cheaper for the budget as well) was right there, I don’t know.

As for the critter action, it’s also bad. It’s pretty clear that the creative team saw how Gremlins 2 took the little monsters and turned them into live-action cartoons, and so they wanted to do the same with the critters here. They’re sillier, they’re dumber, and they get into “zany” action. Now, this is all tempered by a tiny budget that couldn’t be stretched far at all, so all the zany action happens in a single kitchen, with the critters throwing flour around, drinking liquid soap, and eating beans so they can fart, but still… silliness. Whatever horror the critters could produce by this point in the series is lost in these moments. These are just dumb looking puppets, and the film ruins the tiny bit of mystique they still had.

What we’re left with, then, is a horror film with no horror, a bad story that barely holds together at all, and a production team that feels very checked out. The best thing about the film is the cast, and they’re doing all they can to earn their paychecks. It’s just sad they’re saddled with this film as they could have certainly done a whole hell of a lot better. The film is bad, just a total waste of time and resources… and we’re somehow not even done with the series yet.