In short: Critters (1986)

A shipful of furry, hungry and very rude aliens break out of prison and land near one of those archetypal US small towns the horror genre loves so dearly (to destroy) to get some lunch. Humans, cows - the Crites, as they are called, eat whatever you got, though the movie’s cat is a true survivor.

Particularly threatened is the Brown family – mother Helen (Dee Wallace), father Jay (Billy Green Bush), teenage daughter April (Nadine Van der Velde) and youngest Brad (Scott Grimes) – but since this is an 80s PG-13 movie, of their circle, only April’s new boyfriend (as portrayed by a young Billy Zane who wasn’t quite as disturbingly toothy an actor at this point in his life) gets eaten.

While the Earth authorities are rather slow in reacting, the space prison has sent two bounty hunters with shape-changing abilities to take care of the situation. One of them quickly takes on the appearance of a pop singer (Terrence Mann), while the other one has problems not having a new face pop up every two scenes. Not that they’re terrible great at killing the critters; they do have the whole wrecking a town thing down pat, though.

I’ve never loved Stephen Herek’s SF horror comedy quite as much as some people do. It is, admittedly, one of the better examples of the 80’s obsession with small furry monsters, but then, apart from Joe Dante’s Gremlins, that’s not exactly a corner of the genre full of great, or even decent, movies. Decent, at least, Critters certainly is. It mostly suffers from problems with follow-through and a curious unwillingness to actually milk its own ideas for comical effect. For example – and this is really only one of many - why create a fake music video and let one of the bounty hunters take on the singer’s appearance, but then not really use that as a running gag during the course of the movie?

The film also introduces way too many characters for its own good, jumping around between them in a way that does help neither the comedy nor suspense parts of the film, dragging things out much more than they should be dragged out, burying the better ideas and moments under stuff that’s just…there for no good reason.


Really great, however, are the special effects by the Chiodo Brothers and company, providing the little nasties with proper personalities, expressions, and finding design-wise exactly the right spot between funny and threatening. If that saves the film for a viewer is simply a matter of taste; it doesn’t for me, but then, I find most of the film simply neither terribly funny nor terribly exciting and have perhaps lost the patience for the whole US small town under threat thing.

Monster! (1999)

Med student Travis (Tobias Mehler) comes to the charmingly named town of New Purgatory (you think it’s nice and sunny there?) to take care of his grandfather Lloyd Reeves (M. Emmet Walsh). When he was younger, Lloyd starred in a long series of local low budget horror movies that are still celebrated with an annual movie festival in town, but in his old age, Lloyd seems to have gotten it into his head these films are actually real, and he has been fighting a monster that returns every three years since 1969. People aren’t just talking about Lloyd, they are starting to think he might be some kind of crazy killer in the making.

After some embarrassing events, the boss of the local psychiatric clinic grudgingly releases Lloyd into Travis’s custody. Lloyd tries to explain the whole problem to Travis as he sees it: there’s not just the monster problem threatening the town, the place is actually getting trapped in the rules and tropes of one of his monster movies too whenever monster time comes around. Not surprisingly, Travis doesn’t believe a single word of this, and when a teenage couple is killed while Lloyd is out and about screeching warnings like a madman while wielding an axe, he even believes the going theory his grandpa is an axe-murdering maniac.

However, Travis will change his tune soon enough, and he, the town doctor’s daughter Jill (Angela Keep), and the white, hip-hop loving youth of town might just take over the town hero job from Lloyd.

The 90s were a particularly bad time for horror TV movies; as a matter of fact they were a pretty bad time for TV movies period. So stumbling about a neat little film like John Lafia’s horror comedy made for the UPN (whatever that is) among the dross is a rather pleasant event. What’s even more pleasant is that this is actually a film that gets the ironic and knowing approach to horror film – or to be precise, old monster movies – right. There’s neither superior smugness that suggests the filmmakers don’t actually like the genre they are working in nor the big gesture of deconstructing the genre further than the film actually does on display. Lafia’s approach is loving, slightly nostalgic, and often actually funny, playing with the elements that make up a monster movie while still allowing the film to be one.

You could of course argue the film treats its material in a rather harmless way, never really delving into how horrible the basic concept of a town regularly trapped in monster movie tropes actually is, with people forgetting the dead afterwards and falling into the character types of low budget movies every three years. It’s as nightmarish as Thomas Ligotti’s philosophical stance, the longer I think about it. But then, it’s probably for the better it’s not me writing these movies, or what is supposed to be a fun, knowing romp would turn into weird cosmicist nightmare without any solution.

Monster! isn’t totally unconscious of these things, though. At least, it makes the very sympathetic attempt to change the role of The Girl into something more active, even suggesting Jill might be the more competent Town Hero, which isn’t at all something I’d expected to find in a TV movie of its time. Why, there might even be hope of the town breaking out of the endless cycle and moving into another movie.

Otherwise, Monster! is very much your typical fun TV monster movie, the sort of thing you might get to see on the SyFy Channel if you’re lucky, with an unconvincing yet cute CGI monster, inexperienced but decent and pretty leads supported by some experienced character actors (Walsh is a total hoot, it’s only too bad he never actually played in many monster movies), and competent direction. I can see this as a feel-good movie for the whole family, if your family is a bit like mine.

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