Critters 2 - Because the world was apparently BEGGING for more Don Opper

When the original Critters debuted on theater screens in 1986, undoubtedly there were a lot of people laughing at the trailers and TV spots.  What made these people think that this cheesy, low-rent Gremlins ripoff could ever last more than a week in major theaters?  Alas, for whatever reason, the movie really connected with audiences; yeah, it was family-oriented, but it was family-oriented in an even goofier manner than Gremlins.  I'm DEFINITELY not saying that Critters was the better film, but few could argue that it did a decent job carving out its own niche in this very select market quite well.

Since the movie effectively cost peanuts and made its budget back six times over, it didn't surprise many when the sequel showed up on the big screen two years later.  Hopes were high...but for whatever reason, a lot of the luster was lost, and Critters 2: The Main Course was nowhere near the hit that the first film was.  The budget was raised to a respectable $4.5 million, but it failed to even recoup that budget in theaters (by comparison, the original cost less than half that amount and grossed more than $13 million).  And while reviews weren't disastrous, the response from both critics and audiences was lukewarm. 

So you know what that meant for the series after this.  Direct-to-video city, baby.

But that's a separate rant for a separate day.  Critters 2 is an okay film, but nothing special, and my opinion on it hasn't changed much in the 20 years or so since I took it in for the first time on one of those many, many forays into The Greatest Video Store Ever.  As a kid, I loved the increased focus on the Critters themselves but didn't like the fact that we got more of one particular character than we could have ever bargained for.  More on that later.

One thing that I forgot to mention in the review of the first film was that, before the credits, we were treated to one of my favorite sights whenever I'm watching some of my older horror DVD's - the old-school New Line Cinema intro.

Ah, that's the stuff.  What this always tells me is that we're back in the day before New Line Cinema was a huge Hollywood entity, when studio head Robert Shaye was utilizing horror and exploitation films in a desperate attempt to carve out a place for himself in the entertainment world.  Yeah, New Line may be the house that Freddy built, but the original Critters wasn't far behind, and the profit margin on that film played a big role in expanding New Line's distribution and, of course, getting a new intro. 

Another key facet of this was ol' Bob's ability to find good up-and-coming directors, both in the Elm Street flicks and here.  The first film had Stephen Herek, and this time around, it's Mick Garris, who is now a seasoned horror veteran and a personal favorite of legendary author Stephen King.  Which only makes sense, since Garris has helmed three King projects - the theatrical film Sleepwalkers and the TV miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining.  Despite the banal script, Garris does his damndest with this movie, and knowing his eventual pedigree, it's hard to complain about him.

With that, THE MOVIE!!

Hey, remember Charlie from the original movie?  Yeah, I know, I would prefer not to remember him either...but he's back.  And not only that, he's the first person we see.  Turns out he has accomplished his implied goal from the ending of the previous movie and joined Ug and Lee on their interplanetary bounty hunting excursions.  After wasting an alien beast that kinda looks like a giant version of a Ridley Scott face hugger, their big-headed leader - which Charlie astutely calls "your holiness" - says that Crite life still exists on Earth, and it's no money for them until they're all wiped out.  So it's back to Earth we go.  It should also be noted that, although he's only spoken three lines of dialogue so far, Charlie - once again played by Don Opper - hasn't lost any of his ability to annoy the ever-loving hell out of me.  The less things change, the more they stay the same and all.

Within short order, we're re-introduced to Brad Brown.  Scott Grimes returned to the role, presumably while under duress, and all things considered does a pretty damn commendable job playing the slightly older and awkward teenage version of Bart Simpson circa 1986 we saw in the original film.  He's back in Grover's Bend to visit his grandmother (who runs a day care center), and quickly forms a friendship with Megan (Liane Curtis), local hottie who works as a reporter for her dad's newspaper.  In addition to finding cherry-bomb wielding miscriants cool, Megan has an ulterior motive in engaging in this fascinating little romantic subplot with Brad, as it's big business in Grover's Bend to cover the return of the boy who cried critter.  And just how much raw tension does this courtship contain?  Bradley, charmer that he is, tells her that she's "like Jimmy Olsen with breasts."  If that isn't enough to make women's panties moisten, I don't know what is.

Well, you might be wondering by this point what any of this has to do with Critters.  Hang on, because I'm getting there.  Apparently, Crites have a two-year-long incubation period, because that's how long the eggs left behind from the previous movie have been sitting around.  I suppose I could point out the convenience of this exact time span given that Brad just so happens to be back in town, but I'm not in that much of an annoying mood.  It isn't long before we're blessed with our first victim - one of the completely inconsequential noodniks who found the eggs and delivered them to Brad's Nana's day care center for use in an Easter egg hunt.  I think it's the fact that he charged ten bucks a piece for them that sealed the deal in his death warrant, as the Crites soon come to life and swarm him with their roll-em-up action.

I'll give it to the film in one regard - the Crites themselves look a whole lot cooler in this installment than they did in the original flick.  In that one, they were relegated mostly to the darkness or obscured by about 17 layers of shadows, and by the end of the film when they were laying waste to half the town, they were almost always shown from the neck-up.  Here, they're all out in the open, and that much more glorious.

Back to our little dog and pony show, we soon enough get kill #2, which IS different, considering that the body count in the first film was something like two for the entire running time.  THIS death is...something else, I tell ya, consisting of a man dressed in an Easter bunny costume being attacked by a whole slew of the Crites.  From what I can gather, a few of them roll into his costume, eat the poor dude's CROTCH (ouch), causing him to hop away and crash through a church window.  I award this sequence 10 Fonzie cool points.

And, at roughly the halfway point of the film, the bounty hunters arrive!  Ug, for those interested, is still played by Terrence Mann and still taking the form of Johnny Steele - the greatest fictional '80s rock singer of all time, for my money -  because "the body fit."  At least that's the explanation that he gives the ever-inquisitive Charlie.  Anyway, his partner is still wandering around as a faceless drone, and needs to blend in.  Thus, Lee scopes out a copy of Playboy, and, well...

...Yeah.  Now, like the original, this flick was rated PG-13, and, for my money, it really pushes that rating to the limit.  As an example, Lee's transformation to random Playboy chick is complete with titshots.  There's much more murdering, chaos and debauchery in this flick than in the original, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't come across quite as fun.  It could be familiarity, it could be something else, but all things added up, Critters 2 felt like a bit of a hohum effort.  Methinks it could have benefited the movie greatly to embrace being a full-on sleazy R-rated splatterfest.

Back to this fascinating little recap, the Crites attack Nana's day care center and appear to have Brad and his grandmother trapped before they are saved by the bounty hunters, leading to a heartwarming resurrection with Charlie.  It's resonant if you wish really hard for it to be. 

From this point forward, the movie speeds up a great deal.  I would say that this is where the film is similar to James Cameron's Aliens, but I'm not that much of a moron.  The Crites begin to wreak havoc all over the town.  There's no room for debate this time when it comes to the reality of the critters - everyone in this movie has now seen them, as evidenced by this next sequence, which is inarguably the movie's money scene.

A group of the Crites have taken up residence inside the local fast food joint and are eating everything in sight when Ug and Lee burst in and blast them to smithereens.  The makeup effects here are pretty incredible as Crite after Crite eat the blasts from the bounty hunters' badass energy weapons, exploding into green, gloppy messes in the process.  It's a cinematic masterwork already watching an '80s cock rocker and a Playboy centerfold wield huge guns and lay waste to an army of puppet eating machines, but it's so much better when you factor in this visual...

The bounty hunters make their way out into the town, where chaos is ruling the streets.  Lee makes a cardinal error in judgment here, deciding to investigate strange sounds coming from a cutoff and poorly lit alley.  Horror movie survival rate if choosing this course of action: somewhere around 4%.  Sure enough, he/she (since Lee is back in the form of Playboy bimbo after briefly taking the shape of a nerdy town resident - don't ask) is soon overpowered by Crites, causing Ug to scream in regret/anguish with such a womanly touch that Mark Patton from Nightmare on Elm Street 2 would be damn proud.  If you wanted some unintended hilarity with Critters 2, this is the place to get it.

The remaining townspeople soon barricade themselves inside the church, where the former Sheriff - a terminally country country bumpkin who throws around the word "ass" so much that you'd swear it was some kind of inside joke - manages to pick off a few of the Crites with his revolvers.  It's here where we get one of the better plot escape hatches that I've seen, as, through a MONSTROUS coincidence, there just so happens to be a massive hamburger factory located just down the block from the church.  Since Brad is the new supreme dictator of the hero faction considering that Ug has now reverted to an emo/faceless form, he comes up with a plan for the ages: trick the Crites into entering said factory and chowing down before setting off a bunch of explosives inside, presumably killing them all.  After exactly 60 seconds of debate, the entire town agrees on this point of action.

One quick thing that I'd like to mention - Megan's father has an assistant at the newspaper in this film, and said assistant is played by Lin Shaye.  Lin is, of course, Robert Shaye's real-life wife, but she's always been a personal favorite of mine for her character actor roles, having appeared in a TON of the early New Line Cinema features (for example, she plays a teacher in the original Nightmare) and later appearing in the the Farrelly Brothers' trilogy of awesomeness in the '90s as Mrs. Neugeboren in Dumb and Dumber, Magda in There's Something About Mary, and Roy Munson's sex-crazed landlady in the greatest movie ever made, Kingpin.  She might not be onscreen much in most of her movies, but she is more memorable than 95% of the current generation of movie "stars."  Not looking at you at all, Pattinson, Mara, Mulligan, Bale, etc. 

So start working on some tongue exercises by Friday, Munson!

Now that the non-horror-related tangent is out of the way, back to the show.  Our heroes sneak over to the mammoth warehouse full of burgers, cheese slices and pickles, utilizing some giant fans to blow the scent in the direction of the Crites.  I haven't mentioned it yet in this review, but yeah, the Crites still talk via the power of subtitles in this movie, although we don't get any f-bombs dropped, and it's here where we get a fascinating dialogue sequence where one Crite extolls the virtues of live meat, while a much larger one points out the benefits of the cheeseburgers.  The latter argument wins out, due to, and I quote, "NO BONES!"

And the plan works.  The Crites swarm the warehouse, Brad sets off the explosives, and all appears right with the world.  And, well, you won't believe what happens next...

Yeah, that's right.  The Crites are in fact NOT dead, and have merged together in the massive unstoppable Critter ball that you see in the above picture!  Seeing this movie as a kid, the Critter ball was a paragon of coolness.  This is probably the flick's second best sequence after the fast food massacre, as the ball squashes a few random victims and even picks one completely to the bone within a matter of microseconds.  It's complete with a shot of the bloody skeleton and everything.

Since everyone is yelling now, it's obviously time for this movie to hit the skids.  Brad and Megan enter a truck and do their part to run the ball off the road to...do something, it's not made completely clear what this is.  And then, from the heavens, we are given a savior.  A beacon of hope.  A light for the universe.  And this hope...is Charlie.

Yup, Charlie - who a few moments earlier ran away from the action in what was perceived to be a cowardly fashion - has commandeered Ug's spaceship, which he flies into the Critter ball.  And that's all folks, the movie is basically over.  But not before we get perhaps the MOST happy Wayne's World-approved Mega Happy Ending I've ever seen in a horror film, as Brad finally gives us his "Brad locks lips with Megan" scene, Ug heads back out to space, and Charlie is made the FREAKIN' SHERIFF OF GROVER'S BEND.  Nope, not kidding.  He is given a badge, he has a big goofy smile on his face, there's tender, tinkly music.  And the movie fades to black.

Final thoughts: I was middle ground on it as a kid, and I'm still middle ground on it now.  The first movie, despite its obvious connections to a much more successful movie, just felt like it had this really cool, fresh burst of vitality.  This one just feels a little tired and worn out.  The first 45 minutes or so REALLY drags, but once it gets going, it's got some decent sequences as well as some solid monster action.  But still not enough to make up for Don Opper serving as the savior of a town. 

** 1/2 out of ****.  Mildly recommended for fans of the genre; not recommended for movie fans at large.