Nerding Day: Gremlins 2 (Patreon)

When I was in college, one of my professors once said, “Art can have no practical function,” and I was like, “Wow, so deep. If that’s your very narrow definition of what art is; then I think the only truly artistic film is Gremlins 2 The New Batch.”

Most movies have a clearly defined function. They’re made to make money. The people who made Gremlins 2 were not interested in making money. They were interested in making sure the Gremlins franchise died.

The basic plot of Gremlins 2 is that the Gremlins are released in a fancy office building/mall of the future and wreak havoc. There’s also a genetic engineering lab in the mall/office, and a bunch of the Gremlins drink science liquid that mutates them into hybrid Gremlins of various types including bat, smart, vegetable, and girl.

You might be asking, what?. Shut up and go watch the only truly artistic film, you uncultured swine is my only response. The Gremlins reproduce asexually but are also all boys, and one of them drinks girl science liquid and becomes a girl. What further questions could you possibly have?

It’s hard to write anything about Gremlins 2 because I think it’s a perfect film. I wouldn’t change a single moment of it. I cried the first time I saw it because it’s filmmaking in its purest form, and I will never create something that beautiful. I hung out with a bunch of film school kids in college. I helped make several student films, and Gremlins 2 has the tone of a student film. It feels like someone fucking around with their friends, but they have a fifty million dollar budget and a highly trained team of professional Gremlin hat makers at their disposal.

There have already been a lot of discussions online about what happened in the writer’s room of Gremlins 2 to make it so balls to the wall nuts. Key And Peele made the definitive sketch on the subject about a “script doctor” who comes in and adds all of the crazy Gremlins to Gremlins 2. It’s hilarious, but it’s also just a description of real things that happen in the movie.

The whole idea behind the sketch is that it’s impossible to explain the thinking behind this movie. Something crazy had to happen for the vegetable Gremlin to make it into a major motion picture. Luckily, someone had to sit down and answer for the cinematic perfection of Gremlins 2. There’s a director’s commentary on the DVD, and I listened to it!

Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins 2, is the main contributor to the commentary, but he’s also joined by producer Michael Finell, screenwriter Charlie Haas, and lead human actor Zach Galligan. (As they point out in the commentary, Gizmo is the real star).

Joe Dante comes in hot by calling the movie “The most unnecessary of all sequels,” and says the commentary crew is there to “fill up 106 minutes,” so right away, we know he’s bringing the exact energy to the commentary track that he brought to the movie. This energy:

Then he tries to soften that intro a little with a kinder description of the movie that I wholeheartedly agree with: “I think in some ways this is one of the most unconventional studio movies ever. If the studio wasn’t in dire need of another one of these movies, I can’t conceive of us ever getting away with this or anything like it. It breaks a lot of rules which I think is its major quality.”

Yes, there is no other movie where fifty monster puppets sing "New York New York," and I don’t think there ever will be. Joe Dante really didn’t want to make Gremlins 2. He talks about his decision to finally participate in the film after it had been kicked around the studio system for several years unsuccessfully, like a woman talks about getting back together with a bad ex-boyfriend.

He says one day he ran into a studio head on a backlot by accident and was offered complete creative control. “Anything within 90 minutes and 2 hours, and we’ll film it.”  It’s so rare to be offered that kind of creative freedom in Hollywood and even rarer to take that freedom and do this with it:

Yes, that's a Gremlin drinking from a little vial with a brain on it, as if the scientists in this genetic engineering lab can't read, so they have to label every bottle with pictographs like it's goddamn ancient Egypt. He then goes through a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde transformation and spontaneously grows tiny Gremlin glasses to show that he is now so smart his body has to compensate for the extra intelligence by dumping his eyesight. There are so many great revelations in the director's commentary about this lab scene which introduces the mutated gremlins.

First off, the Key and Peele Gremlins 2 sketch was not wrong about one insane guy sparking the creation of all the Gremlin hybrids, but that guy wasn't a script doctor. He was a special effects artist named Rick Baker, who has had a pretty incredible career, but who also did special effects for Flesh Gordon, yea you know I spelled that right. Flesh Gordon's IMDB description says, "Emperor Wang is the leader of planet Porno and sends his mighty "sex ray" towards Earth, turning everyone into sex-mad fiends. Only one man can save Earth, football player Flesh Gordon."

Anyway, Rick Baker didn't want to work on Gremlins 2 because designing his own creatures was his favorite part, and he didn't want to work with someone else's designs. To which, Joe Dante said, "Fine. Design a bunch of new Gremlins; who cares?" Then he pulled out one of those guns that shoots money and showered Rick Baker in it until he agreed to design the vegetable Gremlin.

So Rick Baker alone is the reason for the genetics lab subplot, which is honestly a good forty percent of this movie. Gremlins 2 is basically the play CATS but with Gremlins. A new Gremlin is created every few minutes, and then instead of singing a song about how it wants to die, it wrecks some stuff in a funny way, or puts on a little costume and runs around, and that's the whole movie.

The rest of the scenes are excuses for the director to take out his frustration at the first movie. There's a part that's designed to look like the film has broken in the theater, and Gremlins have gotten into the projection booth. During this pause, a mother drags a child out of the theater to complain about the movie. Joe Dante says this really happened to him during a screening of the first Gremlins film, and the kid eventually ran away from the Mother and hid for the rest of the movie in the theater so he could finish it.

Joe Dante took 50 million dollars and used it to complain about every little annoying experience he had because of the previous film. In a way, you could say the purpose of Gremlins 2 was revenge. He keeps mentioning how much "the movie" loves to torture Gizmo and laughing during the scenes where Gizmo gets hurt.

During the big "New York New York" scene, the producer mentions they actually put up a signup sheet for the crew saying if anyone has an idea for a Gremlins gag, write it down, and according to him, several of the suggested gags made it into the movie. Those Gremlin puppets cost thousands of dollars, and anyone could have written a bit where the Gremlins tell their ex-wife to suck it, and it probably would have made the final cut. Phantom Of The Opera Gremlin did.

The commentary is a great lesson in the surprising number of things that can slip through the cracks in a movie. They had written the whole scene where the bat Gremlin flies out of the tower in the middle of the day into New York City before they remembered that one of the very few established Gremlin rules is that they are allergic to sunlight. So the writer added the line about "genetic sunblock" being in the lab. It's a blue pool of liquid with a crossed out sun wearing sunglasses on it.

They wrote genetic sunblock down and then moved on. Only the bat Gremlin uses the genetic sunblock. All of the other ones, including the brainy one, just stay inside and wait for night to fall so they can leave the building. Why? Because Hulk Hogan is in this movie. There's a UHAUL on the second floor of an office building. Nothing matters, we're all going to die, but I mean that in a fun way! That is the moral of Gremlins 2.

As someone who's watched this movie a lot, the biggest question I was hoping to get answered in the director's commentary was, where do the Gremlins get their little outfits? Did they make them themselves? Can Gremlins also be milliners? I'm proud to announce nobody else cares about that.

"Where they got this stuff is anybody's guess," Zach Galligan says at one point.

"I mean, it's a big mall. There's stuff for sale," Joe Dante replies. Please direct me to the store that sells the tiny sombreros! I need one right now. Don't ask me why.

You'll probably be surprised to learn that no one was sure how to end Gremlins 2. The original ending involved filling the mall/office with concrete. They had almost cut the electricity Gremlin from the film due to its animation being costly and it having no real bearing on the plot until they realized they could use it for what they gleefully described as "an orgy of Gremlin death that goes on for a long time."

When Zach Galligan floats the possibility of the ending of Gremlins 2 setting up a Gremlins 3, Joe Dante snaps, "I spent a lot of time in Gremlins 2 making sure there wouldn't be a Gremlins 3." He says the original script contained a scene where a scientist showed up with a tiny raincoat he had designed for Gizmo so that he could never get wet ever again. And, I mean, we really should sterilize Gizmo somehow. I don’t disagree with the man.

Of course, there’s already a Gremlins 3 currently being kicked around the studio system with a “dark and twisted” screenplay written by Chris Columbus who wrote the original, and I think that sucks. Gremlins 2 is my Gremlins. It might have single-handedly insured that another movie like it will never be made. I’m fine with them making a Gremlins 3 but Gremlins 2 should set the tone.

If Gremlins 3 takes place in any Gremlins 2 erasure, I will not be endorsing it. I want Gremlins 3 on a space station run by the Iron Sheik, with a UHAUL in it and an unlimited supply of floating top hats. The Gremlins should sing Mariah Carrey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" because, oh yeah, it's also a Christmas movie, and yes, Santa Clause is in it, and also yes, he's really seven Gremlins stacked on top of each other.

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