This Gremlins Commentary Track With Zach Galligan Is All You Need For Chirstmas

By Brent McKnight | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

movies-gremlinsChristmas is tomorrow, and as you might imagine, people out in the world are talking a lot about Christmas movies right now. Frosty the Snowman, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and It’s a Wonderful Life are all well and good, especially if you have kids, but there’s also definitely room for more grown up, bawdy fare, like Bad Santa and Christmas Vacation. Some of our favorite holiday viewing, however, is much less traditional. We consider Die Hard and Lethal Weapon to be Christmas movies, and you may recall the likes of Children of Men, Prometheus, and Brazil are all set during the season, though none of them exactly scream “Happy Holidays,” do they? One of our favorites in this realm is Joe Dante’s Gremlins, and fans are in for a badass holiday treat.

Star Zach Galligan plays Billy Peltzer, the kid who inadvertently unleashes a horrific plague of the titular monsters on his hometown, in Gremlins. Earlier this year, he stopped by the Movie Crypt podcast over at Geek Nation, and contributed to an awesome new commentary track to play along with the movie. Merry Christmas to us all. Check it out below:

Hosts Joe Lynch (Knights of Badassdom) and Adam Green (Hatchet) don’t normally invite people involved in specific movies on to add to their commentaries—they say they tend to be too serious or too closely resemble what you find on a Blu-ray or DVD, and that’s not their jam. Galligan, however, is apparently a personal friend and was in town, and what you get here is definitely not what you normally find on a sanctioned release.

This all over the board. The whole thing starts out with an intro, followed by a conversation between the two and Galligan that not only covers Gremlins, but topics that range all the way back to how he was discovered and got into acting in the early 1980s. This whole affair clocks in at almost three hours, and there’s a ton of great stuff before you get anywhere near the actual movie and commentary.

You’ll have to pop in your own copy of Gremlins (you know you have one) to watch along, but it is absolutely worth the investment of your time. Not only are Galligan, Lynch, and Green all entertaining and insightful, there are all kinds of behind-the-scenes stories, anecdotes from the set and production, and even glimpses into the larger industry. Fans will learn some new things, and even non-fans will gain a whole new appreciation for the film.

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