Avis des critiques

Dante's 1984 novelty hit poked fun at cutesy, sub-Spielberg entertainment, but its sequel aims at larger targets. In its first five minutes alone, it satirizes regurgitated sequels, gentrification, and the corporate takeover and subsequent exploitation of entertainment for mind-numbing profit. The rest of the movie only doubles down on the joke-per-second ratio, from Looney Tunes intrusions to a Persona-esque mid-movie meltdown that gets back on track with the help of Hulk Hogan.

As with the recent CABIN IN THE WOODS, an antiseptic and efficient surveillance bureaucracy is portrayed as a form of social organization whose continued survival is undeserved, and which must be duly and gleefully demolished by monsters of its own creation. This destruction is enacted through scene after scene of diverse genre parodies of camp cinema.

Despite the incessant, and admittedly hilarious, sideswipes at Hollywood, during my latest viewing, I found the film to be rather depressing (in a good way, I suppose). In fact, what the gremlins represent is not just absent-minded chaos but pure anarchy — the breakdown of societal order. They are the repressed ids of the working man, living from day to day, pissing on his dreams, relinquishing his last few shreds of pride — and self-esteem — with every pestiferous paycheck.

There's an odd semblance to the entire ordeal, an unlikely testament to Dante's bare-minimum approach to narrative consistency and Haas's seemingly scatterbrained script. Packed though it is with anti-capitalist sentiment and cynicism born of political exhaustion, Gremlins 2 is less concerned with making a statement or a point than it is with losing it at and on the movies, disregarding concepts of clear analysis and embracing a philosophy of joyous cinematic discord.

In what must count as one of the most bizarre and outrageous sequels ever made, Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) pulls out all the stops, mercilessly parodying the original film (characters point out flaws in the Gremlin ‘rules', there is a comedic spin on Phoebe Cates' ‘Santa Claus' speech from the first film and a bunch of Gremlins strangle film critic Leonard Maltin as he pans the original film on a TV show).

Unlike its predecessor, Gremlins 2 has no ambiguous attitudes about its world and its characters, or any subversive agenda apart from its up-front satire. What you see and hear is what you get; it's often funny but never very profound. The movie invites you to get lost in its amusing details, but it lacks both the suspense and the occasional scariness of the original.