Critters

Joe Dante’s »Gremlins« (1984) was undoubtedly an inspiration for Stephen Herek’s horror and science fiction satire »Critters«. But Herek does not simply copy his predecessor. He finds his own tone, one that pays homage both to the small science fiction and monster films of the 1950s and to the modern B-movies of the 1980s.

The Critters: small, furry, and voracious aliens, have escaped from an intergalactic maximum-security prison and land, of all places, in a small town in Kansas. But it is not only the ever-hungry furballs – their pursuers, two shape-shifting extraterrestrial bounty hunters, also plunge the town and the Browns, a classic All-American family, into chaos.

Stephen Herek’s directorial debut, in which Don Opper plays a likeable loser who rises to the occasion in the face of the alien threat, is a brilliant genre parody, with every scene reflecting how much fun everyone involved had.