Everything Wrong With Gremlins In Roughly Eight Minutes
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Over the holiday season, there was much debate about what makes a good Christmas movie. While movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation are good choices, some might argue that movies like Die Hard and Gremlins are not Christmas movies, even though they take place over the Christmas season. I thoroughly disagree with this argument. Gremlins promotes family unity, togetherness, and personal responsibility during the Christmas season, while also injecting terrible, terrible trouble-making Mogwais.
In the spirit of the season, the people at CinemaSins have created an “Everything Wrong With Gremlins in Roughly Eight Minutes” video. The biggest thing that I never noticed from Gremlins is that the back lot set of Kingston Falls is the exact same one used as Hill Valley in Back to the Future. This blew my mind.
Another fun fact: the titles on the movie marquee are the working titles for E.T. (A Boy’s Life) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Watch the Skies). Steven Spielberg has a penchant for putting fake movie titles in films he produces. Jaws 19 was in Back to the Future Part II. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s King Lear and Jack and the Beanstalks — starring Robin Williams — turned up in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
The ending of Gremlins also reminds me of the ending of Inglourious Basterds, with both using a movie theater to trap and blow up the Gremlins/Nazis.
Most of CinemaSins‘ videos are somewhat clever, but usually one-trick ponies that devolve into nitpicking. Hopefully the online video producers will change it up in 2014 because their shtick is getting tiresome. Gremlins and plenty of other beloved movies have their fair share of problems, but good directors like Joe Dante can distract from those mistakes with high action and good storytelling. There’s no such thing as a perfect movie, but there are a few out there like Gremlins that come pretty damn close.
As for the developing Gremlins remake, there hasn’t been much on that front since Warner Bros. announced that the project was in the works last year. The film is believed to be a remake of the 1984 classic, only with new CGI special effects instead of cute puppets. It was initially believed we would be getting the much-rumored Gremlins 3 sequel, but Warner Bros. is going the reboot route instead.
At the moment, Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment still own the rights to Gremlins, so if a new film will be made, Spielberg will most likely be on board as an executive producer. I’d feel better about the new Gremlins movie if Joe Dante was somehow involved with it.
