There’s horror and there’s comedy horror. And then there’s just plain silly. Gremlins 2: The New Batch falls into that last category but with the strange factor that it’s silly without being funny. There are a few smirk moments, and sometimes the self-parody approaches clever, nevertheless it’s bad. It’s a big budget bad movie. The idea that the gremlins try to take over New York City is funny, at first, but other than Phoebe Cates and Christopher Lee, they don’t seem to know this is a satire of Gremlins. I guess not knowing about the plot—I tend not to read reviews about movies before I see them—I was expecting something more like the first one, which I thought was pretty good. The only reason I knew the movie existed at all was that the Blu-Ray version of Gremlins comes with The New Batch. The late eighties and early nineties I was spending holed up in Edinburgh working on a Ph.D. We didn’t have much money and didn’t see many movies. We had no television (there is, or was, a television tax in the UK), so I never heard of the sequel.
I presume we all know the three rules of mogwai, and needless to say, they immediately get broken. The eponymous new batch takes over the Manhattan tower of Daniel Clamp. His high-tech building needs no gremlins because the technology already doesn’t work well. The high rise houses, among other things, a genetics lab where Christopher Lee camps it up, but which means the gremlins have access to formulas that allow them to grow wings, tolerate sunlight, and become spiders. Sound silly? You betcha. One of the gremlins is even able to talk. I watched with increasing stupefaction.
Bad movies and cult followings are the peanut butter and jelly of cinematography. Some bad movies never attain cultdom, but I can see why this one has. The big budget ensured glitz and special effects. Even the self-awareness to have Hulk Hogan being able to control the gremlins in the theater with a threat almost gives the movie an art film feel. The horror, mostly based on the fact that there are monsters, is tightly constrained. Although I felt increasingly like I was wasting my time as the movie went on, upon reflection I can see why some people have glommed onto it. It may just have edged over into the so bad it’s good category. I’ll need to think about it. And avoid eating after midnight.
