"Leprechaun" - The horror franchise about an evil imp looking for his pot o' gold commences!

Way back when the Lick Ness Monster was just a little hatchling, the summer of 1993 was a pretty eventful and formative one when it came to horror fandom.  More than any other time period, that span was when my education took place at the oft-mentioned Greatest Video Store That Ever Existed.  Me and my brother (RIP) took in tons of classic movies during that magical time when the Lex Express was in full effect.  Hellraiser, Child's Play, Bram Stoker's Dracula...the list goes on and on.

However, another movie that we scoped out some long ago Friday night was a micro-budgeted film that made its budget back some ten times over at the box office, and was about to launch a never-ending stream of direct-to-video sequels.  But we'll be getting to those in due time.  That movie is, of course, Leprechaun, the movie that starred the guy from Willow as an evil wisecracking Irish demon searching for his long lost pot o' gold.

At the time, I thought that the movie kind of sucked, although I still enjoyed it just for the pure silliness and spectacle.  After spending 150 minutes watching and dissecting it (that is how long it took - when I write these reviews, I occasionally have to pause in order to do my recapping/backbiting while the events are still fresh in my mind), I'm still of pretty much the same opinion.  There are people in my everyday life who have called me an overgrown man-child, and this diagnosis of Leprechaun pretty much confirms it.  Yes, the movie is pretty terrible, and I can't recommend it with any sort of good conscience, but there are some moments (and one scene in particular) that ALMOST make this worth putting up with 91 minutes of extremely cliched, extremely inane tedium. 

Before we get the hell going with this recap already, I also need to expound on the performance of the guy behind the layers of makeup and false facial hair.  As AFOREMENTIONED, Warwick Davis plays your title character, and while certain parts of this flick - including the Leprechaun's lines - made me want to punch the TV, I can't fault the effort of Mr. Davis.  Here's something that you can take to the bank - when you see a dwarf in a movie, it's a pretty safe bet that he/she will be acting their ass off, as recently seen with Phil Fondacero in the HMM reviewed film Ghoulies II.  Davis might very well be the most successful dwarf in film history, having played everything from an Ewok to Professor Flitwick in the massively popular Harry Potter films, which are so big in mainstream pop culture that I haven't seen a single one of them.  Derp.  Even more, he's actually a HUGE FAN of this character, and has stated in numerous interviews that he treated every film as a serious undertaking.  As someone who has read "Crystal Lake Memories" and paid witness to countless actors making fun of my favorite movie series of all time, this sort of attitude is very refreshing indeed, so five gold stars for Warwick Davis.

What else?  Leprechaun was released in January of 1993, and was actually the first movie that Trimark Pictures ever released.  On a budget of $900,000, it wound up making more than $8 million in theaters and has since become something of a cult hit on video.  Thus, while the flick is nineteen kinds of bad, it's easy to see why we have six of these movies taking up space in the horror section at Best Buy.  I can respect any movie that makes a decent chunk of change from next to nothing of an initial investment, even if I don't necessarily like it.

Oh yeah, and Jennifer Aniston is in this flick. 

With that, THE MOVIE!!

The movie opens in a sea of Irish brogueness that would make WWE's Sheamus red with envy.  An old gent by the name of Daniel O'Grady (Shay Duffin) returns home from Ireland (after presumably burying his mother) to inform his wife that he captured an honest-to-jeebus LEPRECHAUN while away in the land of shamrocks, shenanigans, and House of Pain - and thus, the little guy had to give up his pot of gold, and they are now rich.  Because, you know, that's something that one should just expect to be easily believed. 

I'll give the movie this - it wastes absolutely NO time getting moving, even in comparison to other horror films with a micro small fries budget, to the point where we get our first kill within five minutes of this scene.  Yep, it seems that the Leprechaun stowed away in O'Grady's briefcase, and being none too happy about giving up his precious pot o' gold immediately pushes O'Grady's wife down the stairs, breaking her neck in the process.  In retaliation, O'Grady himself rushes his little green foe with a four leaf clover, which the impish demon recoils in horror from, before locking him in a trunk and immediately dying of a heart attack.  So ends the beginning/exposition phase of the cinematic masterwork that is Leprechaun.  The only other thing to mention at this point is that the Leprechaun makeup work by Gabriel Bartalos is actually quite impressive considering the budget - combined with Davis' earnest portrayal, he's no doubt a distinct and reasonably memorable character.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but an endorsement nonetheless.

From here, we flash forward ten years and meet Jennifer Aniston circa 1992.  In this movie - her first - she plays Tory, a feisty city girl spending a summer in the countryside with her father at an old farmhouse.  I almost LIKE the fact that we're given virtually no back story on Tory and her dad (John Sanderford), as any explanation why they are spending a lengthy vacation in such a decrepit, beat-up, completely out-of-the-way haven wouldn't be accepted in the intricate, moronic recesses of my brain.

Since the majority of you enjoy my reviews being a bit more than just lengthy, bitchy recaps of long-forgotten horror movies from my youth, a few comments on Miss Aniston - surprise, surprise, I'm actually a fan.  I know that her movies are, by and large, box office poison, but I'm a big admirer of her comedic timing and particularly the character of Rachel Green on Friends, where she survived as virtually the only main character who DIDN'T get Flandersized due to a one-dimensional portrayal.  In this movie, she essentially plays a teenage version of Rachel - sassy-but-likable priss - and that's alright by me.  Leprechaun may suck, but she's not a reason.

Time for the amazing plot to get rolling; yeah, Tory's dad has rented a farmhouse for the summer, and I'll give you one guess as to which house this is.  If you answered "the O'Grady house, where a certain murderous Leprechaun is still stowed a away in a crate in the basement," you get a cookie.  Within minutes, one of the painters working on the house - a simplish oaf portrayed by Francis Buxton himself Mark Horton - sets the Leprechaun free.  Fortunately for Horton (who has a made-up name for his character, but I refuse to call him anything else), the Leprechaun's powers are still weak, leaving our official body count still solid at 2. 

Before we delve further into the abyss, there's just a couple more characters that I need to introduce you to for clarification purposes.  One of them is Nathan (Ken Olandt), the hunky leader of the painters who serves as Aniston's source of romantic tension for the film.  Considering the godawful material that they're given and the fact that this story is never given closure, the two actors actually have decent chemistry together.  Rounding out the cast is Robert Gorman as Nathan's little brother Alex, who contributes virtually nothing to the plot other than obligatory "kid in peril" moments that aren't suspenseful in the least bit.  In essence, they could have replaced this kid with a cute furry dog and achieved the same effect.

Since the movie's running time needs to be elongated, none of the other characters believe Horton when he tells them about the murderous imp in the basement, and not soon after, a rainbow appears in the sky.  Ever the opportunist, Horton (no longer scared about seeing a Leprechaun a mere five minutes after the event) finds the end of the rainbow along with two of the Leprechaun's 100 gold coins - one of which he somehow manages to swallow (don't ask).  This leads to death scene #2 of the film, which occurs after he takes the other coin to a local pawn shop.  I remember this death scene vidily from my childhood, and it was actually the scene shown on the Boogeymen DVD release, as Davis hams it up and bounces up and down on pawn shop merchant's bulbous gut with a pogo stick in order to recover his precious coin.  All things considered, this is the movie's money scene.

Unfortunately, immediately following this, we are given a long, crappy, stupendously stupid segment involving a dumb cop stopping the Leprechaun as he speeds back toward the farmhouse (in a power wheel, no less) in search of the remaining 99 gold pieces.  The less said about this death scene, the better.  Upon making it back to the house, the Leprechaun goes to work cleaning every single shoe he finds.  This is worth mentioning because, apparently, the guy was a shoemaker in his previous life, and has a Rain Man-like predisposition to cleaning every piece of footwear that he comes across.  Methinks this is going to be important later.

All of our main characters (minus Dad, who conveniently was attacked by a cat earlier in the film and had to be taken to the hospital) make their way back to the house and find it disarray.  The movie then gives us a few EXTREMELY annoying jump scare scenes, but this serves as the appetizer for what may be the most hilariously stupid sequence I've seen in any horror movie.  Get ready.

OK, I'm jacked about this one.  The core four group of characters hear a bell outside the farmhouse, which prompts dashing Nathan (who by this point has gotten Tory to warm up to his country-boy charms) to go out and investigate.  Somehow, he misses the very poorly concealed bear trap in his walking path, which of course catches his leg in its grip before the Leprechaun reveals itself to him and begins attacking him.  These screams cause the remaining three characters to run outside and check on their de facto leader.  I'll fully admit that I expected the movie to pull the usual "hero tells other characters about the impossible thing he has just seen only for them not to believe" routine...but nope.  Wasting no time, the Leprechaun sprints forward in front of everyone and bites Nathan in his leg wound.  Alex (that would be cute puppy dog kid) picks up a nearby rock and nails his foe with a Hulk Hogan-like limp blow before Aniston begins socking the creature with the butt of a shotgun.  Eventually, Nathan gains control of the weapon and blasts the creature with it.  Inside the house, Horton runs for the phone, telling the redneck cops on the other end that "the leprechaun is attacking - send the marines, send the Navy!"  Hilarity, I tells ya.  The cherry on top?  After being freed from the bear trap by the suddenly strong and resourceful Tory, Nathan shambles forward to the bush that the Leprechaun fell into after being shot and IMMEDIATELY empties every last round of ammunition into the shrubbery.

Everybody got that?

I love this sequence, not only for its start-and-stop editing and questionable material, but for the fact that it combines three tried-and-true tropes of horror films in a single 45-second string of events.  Let's see what we got here:

(1) The quasi-leading man putting himself into harm's way by investigating the STRANGE NOISE outside.

(2) The potentially helpful police officers who laugh off a call for help.  It's something I've seen in a lot of horror films; to cops, all victim characters are lying assholes.

(3) The "running out of ammo" bit, which Nathan gives us for no discernable reason.  Hey, that little bastard fell into the bush - I'm blowing the hell out of it!

So ends the greatest movie scene...there ever was.

As an added bonus (/redundancy), Tory discovers that the phone line is dead, and the movie is able to enter its final trimester as the four idiots find themselves locked in a battle for life against the little beast searching for his lost bundle o' gold.  This makes me quite thankful, as it makes explaining the inane plot being presented far more streamlined from this point forward. 

We get yet another tried-and-true trope in the form of the painters' getaway vehicle not starting (and it's during this scene that I noticed that these guys have the greatest name for a business ever - "3 Guys that Paint"), followed by another uproarious scene as the Leprechaun overturns their vehicle with a tiny dune buggy.  Not QUITE as riotous as the now-immortal bear trap sequence, but it's pretty damn special all the same.  After being chased inside the house, the Leprechaun gets its hand cut off by a closing door, only for the severed limb to open the door by itself and crawl back to its master.  Funny thing about this movie - they actually do a decent job of giving this diminuitive villain a decent slate of powers to make it seem relatively menacing.  In addition to spontaneous hand regeneration, he also has the power to mimic voices, which has come in handy at a few points throughout the movie.  I know I haven't recapped these points, but rest assured, they're there.

Since the crux of this movie is "murderous Leprechaun attempting to find his lost gold," it would help the proceedings swimmingly if...you know...said gold was actually FOUND.  Tory finds it in a well outside the house and gives it to the now magically appearing Leprechaun, who is none too pleased to find that one of the coins is missing.  Before our heroes can escape, the pissed-off and slightly reward-free Leprechaun teleports inside the house so our final faceoffs can commence. 

Firstly, Horton realizes what the Leprechaun wants - the gold coin that he swallowed (which you would realize if you are an especially attentive and/or bored reader).  Proving himself moderately useful, Horton then suggests going to visit Old Man O'Grady, now in a rest home after suffereing the heart attack in the movie's prologue, and they are able to reach Tory's jeep after tossing all of the house's shoes at the Leprechaun.  In this respect, shoes to this character are somewhat akin to rice with vampires, in that it encompasses an OCD-like response that serves as the villain's achilles heel.  Or I'm just looking way too deeply into it.

Well, admittedly, I'm growing somewhat restless wading in the endless muck that is Leprechaun, so let's speed this up, shall we?  Do you really need me to tell you that the good guys win?  Well, they do.  After finding out from a near-dead O'Grady (the Leprechaun beat our heroes to the punch) that four-leaf clovers are Leprechaun kryptonite, they find one of the incredibly rare weeds and, after moderate intrigue, Alex shoots the clover into the Leprechaun's mouth with his slingshot.  Smiles, laughs, shits and giggles all around.  All of our main characters survive, although the film ends with a voiceover by Davis informing us that he is still searching for his gold, cursing both the Earth and yours truly with the promise of more nonaction.

Final judgment: This movie doesn't exactly unspool in a nice, efficient, well-written fashion, and it should be well-apparent reading the above scatterbrained recap (which is even more confusing than usual, I know).  With the exception of Aniston, the hero characters are pretty much unbearable - although I did get a lot of milage out of screaming "Hey, it's Enrico Palazzo!" every time Horton appeared on the screen to no one in particular.  The "scary" scenes aren't scary in the least.  And the story, while occasionally inventive, is incredibly bland and uninteresting.  All that aside...this movie does hold some nostalgic value for yours truly, both for the memory of watching it with my brother almost twenty years ago and for reminding me what horror movies were like in the days before seemingly every major release was a goddamn remake.  And that incredibly awesome bear trap/beating/shootout scene ALONE raised the star rating by a full half-point.

Nonetheless, I'm not looking forward to the rest of this series in the least bit assuming the law of diminishing returns kicks in, because I'm told that this is actually (shudder) the BEST movie in the series.  ** out of ****, and those ** are for ALL the wrong reasons.

Critters 4: What's a Crite Got to Do With It?

Before we get going on this one, it's time for some "boring life and times of the Lick Ness Monster" story hour.  It's been three weeks since my last review.  During that time, most of my spare moments were spent writing and refining a story for a podcast's horror fiction contest.  This story, according to the contest's official rules, had to be original, previously unpublished, scary, and between three and four thousand words in length.  Take one guess as to what my biggest hurdle in that equation was.

It wasn't coming up with an idea, or having the willpower to actually WRITE the damn thing.  Nope.  It was the LENGTH.  In case you haven't noticed, I have a real problem cutting myself off and, you know, not being a boring, blubbering idiot.  I fretted and fretted over that four thousand word limit, to the point where I had to make no less than six different sweeps through the story just to delete extraneous crap in order to shoehorn the entire plot in.  As a result, the whole thing feels like a super sped-up version of what I was attempting to do, and I'll be very surprised if any of you see a story entitled "I Want to Die" (and it's just as life-affirming as that title lets on) in the quarterfinals of the "How Stuff Works" horror fiction contest.  It didn't go too well.

But now I'm back in my element.  It's apparent to everyone who has kinda-sorta followed my reviews that they've gone through a biggie-sizing over the years, starting off as four-five paragraphs of (crappy) gushing and eventually metamorphosizing into the picture-laden recaps that detail almost every nuance of the film in question that you know and loathe today.  And that's just the way I like it. 

So, here we go with Critters 4, where the Crites attack...IN SPACE!  I find it somewhat disturbing that something like 85% of all modern horror franchises feature the inevitable "we're out of ideas, let's throw the villain(s) in space" entry.  It was shot back-to-back with its predecessor, and it also has the return of Don "Fuckhead" Opper in the role of Charlie.  You know, the original Gremlins movie had drunkard Murray Futterman as a supporting character and brought him back in a quasi-starring asskicker role in its sequel.  But Murray Futterman was, you know, cool, and played by Dick freakin' Miller.  How this guy managed to somehow get pidgeonholed into all four of these films, I'll never know.

Except that all four movies have either been produced or written by his older brother. 

What else?  The flick was directed by Rupert Harvey, co-writer of Critters 3 , and that's as deep as I'm digging into his filmography.  And, as crappy as this movie is, it's got a pretty memorable cast.  All of the Critters movies have had a knack for finding actors long before they became prominent - the first had Billy "jerkoff guy from Titanic" Zane, the second had...I dunno, Lin Shaye, and the third had LEONARDO DICAPRIO as a secondary hero and love interest to the main heroine.  This one has Brad Dourif, a man who should be more than familiar to any casual horror fans watching this flick as the voice of Chucky and bit player in approximately 5,000 other horror films, and Angela Bassett, a hot tamale who would go on to be a pretty big star in the '90s, including an Oscar-nominated turn portraying Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It, as well as the vagina-fest [i]Waiting to Exhale[/i] and Wes Craven's [i]Vampire in Brooklyn[/i].  In this film, she has a completely out of nowhere nude scene where a guy stares at her while showering for about a minute straight in a sequence that winds up going completely nowhere.  Yup.  It's there.

THE MOVIE!!

If you'll recall, Critters 3 ended with Charlie finding and destroying all of the Crites terrorizing an apartment complex with the exception of two Crite eggs.  In a somewhat bizarre twist ending, Charlie was contacted by Ug (Terrence Mann), his old bounty hunter friend, and told to load the eggs into an intergalactic space pod.  Well, it's here where the non-action picks up, as Charlie - true to form - completely botches this simple task, loading the eggs but also somehow locking himself inside the vessel before it cryogenically freezes him and takes off.  This guy's likability quotient hasn't gained any traction in the two years since the previous film.

Flash forward to the year 2045, where the pod is discovered by our group of primary characters.  One thing I love about horror movies set in space is how they always - and I mean always - put together a team of astronauts who seem to completely detest each other.  This movie is no different.  The crew manning this salvage ship is comprised of space pirates who want to capture the pod to turn it in for a huge reward.  Your lead douchebag is Rick (Anders Rove), who immediately identifies himself as an a-hole due to his unmistakable sleazy hairstyle.  There's also a young teenage kid named Ethan (Paul Whitthorne, who kinda looks like Zachary Ty Bryan from Home Improvement), computer expert Al Bert (Dourif),  second-in-command Bernie (Eric DaRe), and pilot Fran (Bassett).  Of these, Ethan and Fran are the only ones who don't immediately stand out as future Crite food, although it's always fun to watch Dourif in action.  No matter how bad or cheesy the movie, this dude always gives it his all.  If you want a stronger endorsement, he actually managed to make Rob Zombie's Halloween movies watchable.  I'm not sure there can be higher praise than that.

Anyway, it's here where we get a bit of back story.  The Intergalactic Council from the first three films has now been dissolved, and in its place is Terracorp - a super-duper mega evil conglomerate whose CEO is, amazingly enough, Ug.  He now goes by the name of "Counselor Tetra," and in a video message to our group of pirates tells them that he is prepared to offer them "triple salvage" for returning the pod to one of their waiting space stations.  More importantly, his glorious mullet from the first three films is now gone.  Rick's assholery rises to new levels here, as he attempts to hold out for more money, only for the rest of the crew to bring him to his senses.

Our heroes soon make it to the waiting Terracorp station, finding it abandoned and without half of its survival supplies.  Druggie Bernie immediately wants to raid the station's pharmacy, while Fran goes off to the showers for the AFOREMENTIONED nude scene.  I always enjoy being able to watch big stars in their  formative stages and the things that they were once willing to do just to be in a movie, and it's no different here.  To be fair, Angela Bassett had a pretty damn fine ass in 1992.  Had I discovered this movie in my teenage years (and before internet porn), this scene would have gotten some steady airplay in my VHS.

And now for a long-winded LNM bitching interlude.  A few years back, I saw a movie from the mid '80s entitled Star Crystal that stands today as THE single worst movie I have ever witnessed.  Maybe someday, when I'm feeling really, REALLY bored and masochistic I'll watch it again and scribe a full Horror Movie Mayhem review, but alas, that day has not yet come.  I mention this film because it featured a group of astronauts communicating with a ship's talking computer named Bernice in a never-ending series of dialogue that takes up pretty much half of the movie's running time.  Apparently Rupert Harvey and his team of writers thought this was a really good plot device, because the Terracorp station has a voice-activated computer named Angela that Dourif repeatedly spars with, and while not quite as grating as the scenes from Star Crystal, they still come across as never-ending and pointless.  For some trivia information, Angela (talking computer, not Bassett - it's confusing, I know, so this is the last I'll mention it) is inexplicably voiced by Martine Beswick, a two-time Bond girl who, as Thunderball sidekick Paula Caplan, ranks as one of my top ten hottest chicks in film history.

Life lesson for the day: it's awesome to be as cool as Sean Connery.

35 minutes in, and it's time for Critters 4 to start rolling (pun intended).  Asshole Rick takes it upon himself to open the pod against the wishes of Terracorp, which means that we're once again blessed with the presence of Charlie (yay) for much of the movie's duration.  Of course, the eggs have hatched by this point, and we get the first death of the movie, as Rick bites it at the hands of the newly-birthed baby Crites.  General horror movie rule: if a character is played by an actor named Anders, he's probably not going to survive.  In the process, Charlie saves the life of Ethan (whom Al had sent to the cargo bay to keep an eye on Rick), setting up a friendship that the writers intended to be similar to the Charlie-Brad dynamic from the first two films, but instead comes across ten times as moronic.  After a sequence inside the ship's waste disposal tank (don't ask), all of our characters finally meet up, where Charlie is finally told that he has been floating around in space for 53 years and everyone he knew is dead. 

Al and Ethan are able to hack into the ship's computer system and discover a handy-dandy video that gives us Terracorp's evil plot.  We are shown the rapid development of a creature called a "cephaloid," which Terracorp plans to use to completely eradicate life forms from a target area in order to use as development properties.  I'm always amused by some of the plots that screenwriters manage to dream up for corporations to use in films, and this is one of the best/worst I've seen.  One would think that it would be much easier to simply buy properties that DIDN'T require mass genocide instead of spending the approximately ten trillion dollars in research and development for this particular project, but what do I know?  Terracorp is bad.  It's been established.

Hey, remember how earlier Bernie (whose Jean-Claude Van Damme style ponytail conveys his sliminess) wanted to get all sorts of Iron Sheik-style medicine inside the station's pharmacy?  Well, we FINALLY get the payoff to this angle, as he swipes a keycard and enters the massive pill storehouse.  Of course, he is immediately killed by the two Crites before he is able to do his best Lindsay Lohan impersonation.  Moral lesson from Critters 4: don't be a goddamn pill popper.  This sequence is also approved by CM Punk.

In the process of killing one of the two now fully-grown adult Crites (with a Colt .45, no less), Charlie manages to blow the holy hell out of their escape ship.  Derp.

Shortly thereafter, Terracorp arrives (finally), and shockingly reveal that they have no plans of giving the salvage crew any form of payment.  Yup - they only want the Crite eggs, presumably for their genius plan of colonization/land development, and Ug (still going by that goofy "Counselor Tetra" name) is now a full-on corrupt businessman.  The two other reviews of Critters 4 that I've read both harp on this - Ug had been a heroic bounty hunter in the first two films, and his heel turn here was a little out of left field and unneeded.  Me?  Eh, at least it broke the monotony.  He immediately establishes himself as a huge P.O.S. by killing an uncooperative Al in one of the scenes that actually got an emotional response from me.  I know it didn't come across in this review, but Dourif actually managed to make the dude pretty likable.  He's in the Horror Hall of Fame for a reason.

Since we now have our official government minimum body count met, it's time for this movie to enter its finale.  The nuclear reactor on the station fails, leaving the heroes 10 minutes to wrap up the plot.  Ethan lures the Terracorp stormtroopers into a freaky-looking lab, where a large horde of genetically engineered Crites makes short work of them.  Almost immediately afterward, he also manages to kill the lead Crite via cryogenic freezing, making him a much more effective hero character than Charlie could ever hope to be. 

But alas, we've got one more villain to take care of - yup, it's Ug/Tetra, who is none too happy that his evil plan has been thwarted.  Before he can do away with Ethan, however, Charlie makes his reappearance, blowing his old friend away with the antique Colt.  And...that pretty much wraps it up, with Charlie, Fran and Ethan getting the "sole survivor" honors.  They escape in Ug's ship and the station explodes, killing all of the onboard Crites.  Since there aren't any more Critters movies, I'll take this as a pretty good inkling that the damn things are finally extinct.

Final word: Me no likey.  Critters 4 is generally regarded as the least of the series, and for good reason - compared to its sibling films, it displays a severe lack in charm, scares, and even the Critters themselves.  To be fair, it's always good to see Dourif in action, and he singlehandedly manages to make this movie a bit more than a total disaster, and it's always good to see a series like this actually END.  If you're looking for good, cheesy fun, however, stick with the other movies in the franchise - they're all much more whimsical and good-spirited than this one.  * 1/2 out of ****.

So ends the Critters series in the life of the Lick Ness Monster, and it's now time to start swimming for the next island on the horizon.  I can already see the glow - almost as if there's a big pot of gold up ahead...

The demon from his past that Leo DiCaprio oh-so-desperately wants you to forget - Critters 3!!

Ahhh, Critters 3.  The point at which the most successful Gremlins ripoff franchise went direct-to-video, and the point at which it fully embraced being an all-out cheesefest.  The previous movies may not have been Shakespeare in the park, but by and large took themselves as seriously as movies about tiny aliens with the ability to shoot quills from their asses could be.  This one is goofy to the core, and gloriously stupid.  Stupid movies make me happy, so I knew this one would be a good time from the outset when it gave me something like 5 separate coincidences that all led to the main characters being together in a completely different locale than the film starts out at.  More on that later.

That, and the movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio.  Yup - THAT Leonardo DiCaprio.  You know, the one who critics repeatedly cream themselves over and who draws comparisons to Jack Nicholson, Robert Duvall and other great actors from past generations.  Me?  Eh, take a guess.  In keeping with my known M.O. of being an annoying contrarian, I think the guy is overrated.  More than anything else  he just seems to have the best damn agent in Hollywood more who GETS him these plum roles.  But that's neither here nor there.  It's always interesting to see big, popular movie stars of today in their formative, nonauspicious roles of yesteryear, and that's one of the big boons of spending the $0.98 for a DVD copy of Critters 3.

Other interesting trivia data to impart: this film was shot back-to-back with its immediate follow-up, and while on first glance the two movies could not possibly be more different, we get a sequence that does a pretty commendable job tying the two projects together.  The movie was also directed by Kristine Petersen, a student of the Roger Corman zero-budget school of filmmaking who also helmed 1990's Body Chemistry, a flick that used to get a TON of airplay on the cable movie channels in the early '90s.  As a 12-year-old first discovering that girls weren't just weird-looking boys, let's just say that I used to really enjoy that movie.  Like, really enjoy it.  A lot.

THE MOVIE!!

Meet this flick's nondescript Critters familial unit - the Menges.  There's father Clifford, star character and teenage daughter Annie, and Bart Simpson-esque son Johnny.  Much like the Browns from the first two films, these people aren't annoying, which is always a welcome plus.  The script gives us some reasons to like them - the mother died two years ago, and we get the sense that these people genuinely like each other.  In addition, Aimee Brooks, who plays Annie, has become something of a minor scream queen in the 21st century, having appeared in her fair share of crappy horror flicks including Monster Man, The Hillside Strangler and The Mangler Reborn.  If that's not a resume worthy of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, I don't know what is.

Anyway, we soon get our first truly gasp-worthy moment of the film, as the family pulls over in a rest area after a tire flattens.  Annie and Johnny start playing with a frisbee before being interrupted by Leonardo DiCaprio, who warns young Johnny not to go down into a nearby ravine because there might be "wild animals or shit" down there.  For what it's worth, he isn't bad in this movie as "Josh," the kinda-sorta love interest for Annie who also happens to be the stepson of the big, nasty human villain real estate developer guy who becomes great fodder for the monsters later in the film.  Random trivia fact: Cary Elwes actually turned down the role of Josh.  I had no idea that this role was so desired by young actors in the early '90s.

Without warning, Charlie - still played by Don Opper - bursts into the movie.  Like, literally.  Jumping out of the cold, hard ground, even.  He explains to the kids all about the Crites and his past a big, badass monster hunter, which is helped by his 56K cache memory bringing up videos as visual aids in the form of flashbacks.  You can probably guess what I'm thinking, already...but this guy is still no almighty hero character.  In fact, he's quite abrasive.  What this scene accomplishes?  While Charlie regales them with the story of Critters 1 and 2, one of the remaining Crites (as it turns out, this rest area is near Grover's Bend, the site of the first two films) sneaks into our main family's vehicle and lays some eggs.

The plot magically warps forward until Clifford, Annie and Johnny are back in Los Angeles.  The rest of the film takes place in this shoddy, warn-down apartment complex (but not one owned by Paul Christy, sadly).  For what it's worth, this series has done a good job not feeling like "same old shit," placing the first film in a rural setting, the second in a town, and this one in a large city.  While the plot remains basically the same, at least the scenery changes.  As it turns out, the kids are being dropped off here to stay with their grandparents (the grandmother is played by Frances Bay, who has had TONS of supporting roles in fairly big films over the years) before the father takes off for Chicago.  The more you know.

And we get our first kill!  It's the Guido caretaker of the apartment building, and witnessing how this guy both looks and talks like Doogie Howser's brother, it's a cheer-out-loud moment watching the guy get brutalized in the laundry room.  As for the makeup effects department, the Critters in this film look about as good as they did in the last film, which is pretty f'n good.  In the end, it doesn't really matter, because puppets > CGI any ol' day of the week.

Almost immediately following this, we get a near-miss that I, for one, desperately miss was a bullseye, as the Crites attempt to kill the movie's clueless fatass character.  I've seen and liked this lady in some other movies, but here..."abrasive" doesn't do it justice.  I don't know what it is, but I just have an intense hatred for any woman wearing curlers and flowered dresses.  Maybe it's just me.  Where was I?  Oh yeah - Annie hears Fat Lady screaming and saves her life.  We get the requisite argument between Annie and Clifford (that's the father, for those keeping score) here where the parental figure in a horror movie doubts the horrific story that their child is feeding them.  However, most movies that feature this trope don't feature the clueless parent immediately getting peppered with tiny aliens' sleep-inducing poison quills.  Long live Critters 3!

Hey, remember that Leonardo DiCaprio was in this movie?  Well, he was, and in one of those mystical movie coincidences, his evil stepdad is actually the landlord of the building.  After attempting to call Guido caretaker and getting no answer, he decides to drive over to the place and evict the tenants.  Seems like a sound enough business proposition to me.  What solidifies this guy's position as the one that you most definitely want to see dead (even moreso than flowered dress Fat Lady) is two factors: (1) his moustache - anybody in a movie with sleazy, wispy-thin upper lipular facial hair is one that needs to vanish from my screen, and (2) the fact that he throws around dialogue like "I'm going to evict these people, and you're going to help me, sport!" to DiCaprio.  I've got to hand it to William Dennis Hunt (who also had a supporting role in Dr. Giggles) - he plays an excellent dislikable asshat.

The movie obliges our wishes, as Josh and his stepfather arrive at the apartment complex and the douche stepdad bites it soon enough, leading up to Josh's reunion with Annie.  I didn't mention it before, but there's supposed to be this romantic tension between the two characters.  Admittedly, Leo and Aimee Brooks had a lot of chemistry together as performers, so this aspect of the plot comes off as way better than it should.  The remaining characters soon begin barricading themselves inside various apartment buildings as the Crites begin attacking with more voracity.  Meanwhile, Johnny activates the communicator that Charlie gave him earlier in the movie, and you know what that means.  Shudder.

OK, from this point on, the movie becomes pretty repetitive - various threats being quelled by the plucky hero characters' ability to hide and pick off a few of the Critters at random intervals.  However, there are two sequences that really jumped out at me that I need to discuss at length.

(1) This movie's "comedic" Critters eating sequence.  The first two movies both featured scenes involving the Crites finding some locale where plenty of food is just laying about and snacking down.  This one, though, is quite simply NEVER-ENDING.  One Critter eats beans, complete with the ever-so-funny flatulence take.  Another mows down dish soap.  And the subtitles go on in some nonstop loop.  I realize that these movies are supposed to be goofy, but this was pushing it.

(2) OK, there's a fairly irrelevant character in this movie named Marcia (played by Katherine Cortez) who is basically the assistant maintenance person in the apartment complex.  Needing more subplots, it's implied that Clifford harbors some feelings for her, and throughout the movie, she exhibits some slight motherly behavior towards Annie.  Late in the movie, Marcia volunteers to climb down the side of the complex in order to reach a nearby pay phone.  She slips, with the cable that she was walking on tying around her ankle in the process, dropping her until she is mere inches away from the ground - and only a few feet away from the pay phone.  She swings and attempts to reach it once.  And again.  And again.  And again.  The action even cuts away to the remaining survivors and the Cirtters a few times...and then back to Marcia and this oh-so-amusing game of Pit and the Pendulum.  Yikes.

Just when all appears lost, we hear the familiar asshole-ish "Tarzan" yell, and Charlie arrives on the scene, blowing several of the Crites to bits with his energy weapon and causing the five fans of this series to groan.  The movie attempts to pad out its ending for another ten minutes, but what more do you need to know about this section of the movie?  Charlie arrives, kills the remaining Crites, and all is well.

Yes, folks, we even get another Wayne's World-approved Mega Happy Ending.  I realize that this reference is probably getting old, but what are you gonna do.  I'll take these endings over the dreary, depressing, M. Night Shyamalanadingdong "twist" endings we get with most modern-day horror films any day.  This particular ending has some conflagration of happy events - Leo asks Annie out to a movie, Clifford (who I just now realized is a railroad worker) decides to take a job at the local phone company and stay with his family, and evil stepfather's widowed wife (who seems remarkably upbeat despite her husband having been eaten by space carnivores) tells the tenants that they will be put up in hotels until the apartment building is fixed.  All it's missing is Wayne and Garth waving their fingers and the screen dissolving away.

 However, it's not quite AS happy as that, as Critters 3 contains something MOST unexpected - a sequence that takes place while the ending credits are flashing away.  Charlie is combing through the wreckage of the apartment building, and finds two Crite eggs in a washing machine.  He is ready to destory them when he is contacted by Ug, the interstellar bounty hunter who partnered with Charlie in the previous movie.  This also means that Terrence Mann is just as prolific as Don Opper in the Critters series.  The Intergalactic Council (which sounds impressive enough to capitalize) has decreed that no species can be killed off to extinction, and that they are sending a space pod to Charlie's present location.  Charlie, in turn, is to place the remaining Crite eggs into the pod and await further instruction.  I've got to say, this has me curious as to where this is going.

Final thoughts: Despite the two AFOREMENTIONED never-ending padding sequences, I enjoyed this movie on the stupid entertainment level.  It's short, sweet and decidedly thoughtless, featuring a couple of genuinely likable characters and good performances from Aimee Brooks and Frances Bay (despite the fact that the latter speaks something like 50 words).  Even if you ARE looking at this movie from the stuffy English major standpoint, however, you probably won't outright hate the film, as Brooks saves the movie from being a total trainwreck.  It's difficult to explain...you'll probably realize how dumb the movie is, but you'll like her enough that you won't want to outright savage it.  Me?  I got to watch Leo DiCaprio act all teen angsty and bitchy, and I got to see a guy who looks like a taller version of John Waters get his throat bitten open by a puppet.  On those merits - recommended, brutha.

*** out of ****.

P.S. - Considering what Aimee Brooks grew up to look like, I think Leo really missed out...

 Eat your heart out, Oscar nominee.

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.

Critters - a movie about carnivorous intergalactic beasts that the whole family can enjoy!

Careful - what you're about to watch might actually be a pretty decent movie.  Critters was one of my absolute favorite movies as a child.  It didn't occupy QUITE the same cool quotient that Gizmo and his cohorts occupied, but few movies around that time period did. 

It cannot be overstated just how big of an effect Gremlins had on my life; it is the first movie that I actually remember watching, and ranked respectably on the auspicious list of video titles that I would bore my parents to tears with due to repeated viewings.  How repeated?  Along with Ghostbusters, the somewhat gruesome yet somehow also family-friendly saga of Billy Peltzer and his Mogwai companion was one of only two movies that my mother ever TOOK AWAY for an extended period of time just to get me to stop watching the damn thing.  Now that is some kind of powerful mental hold.

At any rate, sometime in 1990, I saw an ad for this movie called Critters that was about to be broadcast on local TV, and like the misguided bat that I am, I immediately flocked to the channel.  I don't know what it was that these movies about fuzzy and/or freaky-looking demon puppets that fascinated me so much.  Maybe it was because seeing 1' snarling dwarven creatures scream obscenities in subtitles was all kinds of amusing to a six-year-old.  Maybe the effects, consisting of honest stop-motion movement and simple puppetry, pounced on me way harder than anything George Lucas' best visual effects wizards could dream up.  Or maybe I just liked that there were monsters up on the screen terrorizing entire cities who were smaller than me.  It's up for debate, but my money is on the latter.

Some background information - at the time of its release, a lot of people wrote Critters off as nothing more than a Gremlins ripoff, but in actuality, the script had been written BEFORE the Spielberg-produced blockbuster entered production.  Furthermore, it was tweaked even more in the two years between Gremlins and this film's April of 1986 release date, focusing a bit more on the "alien bounty hunter" aspect of the story than it did originally.  Considering that these dudes occupy many of the flick's most hilarious moments (however unintentional they may be), I feel safe reporting this was a good move.

The man behind the director's chair is Stephen Herek, a guy who has actually done some pretty successful movies that I dare say everyone has heard of in the years since Critters, including Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Mighty Ducks, Mr. Holland's Opus, Rock Star and, proving his deft hand at dealing with an evil force that no Crite could ever hope to contend with, directing the man who will one day (sigh) be the head of the world's largest pro wrestling company in The Chaperone.  

And, after 4 1/2 paragraphs of essentially nothing, that about wraps up the introduction.

THE MOVIE!!

The opening segment of the movie takes place in some faraway galaxy, where a small population of the Critters - known as "Crites" within the confines of this film - are being transported to a prison asteroid.  Within short order, they escape, causing one of the benevolent aliens in charge of the prison operation (who admittedly looks AWESOME considering that the budget of this film was two million bucks) to hire out a pair of bounty hunters to track them down.  We haven't seen the crites yet, but if these blank-green-faced big dudes with really, really big guns are after them, they're obviously trouble.

And, just like that, we're back on Earth.  Much like Gremlins, the flick strongly features a kid as one of the central protagonists.  This is always a very dicey issue for horror movie directors - on one hand, a kid in peril generally makes for a bit higher drama than we're used to with these types of films.  On the other hand, some kid actors are really, really annoying.  For his part, Scott Grimes - the man who now does the voice of Steve Smith on American Dad! - manages to be a fairly engaging kid in peril.  He's a sneaky, Bart Simpson-esque character who likes to shoot off fireworks and shoot his sister in the ass with slingshots, constantly raising the ire of his strict father.  It comes off as way more likable than it sounds, believe me.

We're also introduced to the rest of the hero characters - mechanic dad Jay (Billy Green Bush), token slutty character and daughter April (Nadine Van Der Velde), and the guy pictured with Brad above, alcoholic family friend Charlie (Don Opper).  In one of the most baffling decisions that any horror franchise has ever made, it's frickin' CHARLIE of all people who would show up in all four movies in the series, turning into the de facto main protagonist by the end.  In this movie, he's essentially comic relief who really isn't that comic, but other than the moments focused on him, these mundane early scenes do their job - they get you to feel for a somewhat ordinary family about to be faced with somewhat dire circumstances. 

Before we dive further into the abyss, I also need to report that Charlie is involved in this subplot throughout the film where he is convinced that aliens have been trying to contact him for years, and spends a whole lot of tedious airtime crying out to the sky that he was right all along once he sees some actual, live, honest-to-christ REAL aliens.  However, this aspect of the flick repeatedly goes nowhere, so I'll spare you the details.  Trust me, I'm doing you a favor.

Oh, and one more thing - the mother of the family, named Helen, is played by Dee Wallace Stone, someone who truly deserves to be inducted into some kind of horror hall of fame.  She was aces in the Joe Dante werewolf classic The Howling (a flick that, for my money, was loads better than the incredibly overrated An American Werewolf in London), as well as playing the heroine in Cujo and working with Steven f**king Spielberg himself in a little movie about a very different type of alien than the one featured in this film.  You may have heard of that one.

Meanwhile, in space, the bounty hunters - named Ug and Lee (clever, I know) - have tracked the crites to Earth.  Since it would be somewhat conspicuous for two shapeless, glowy-green faced aliens to walk around, they must take a form familiar to the people of Earth.  One of them molds his look after a fictional cock rocker named Johnny Steele (Terrence Mann) - and it's so much more glorious when we get to see the complete accompanying music video first.  Now, it is a catchy song and everything, but heed my warning that you will be sick TO DEATH of it by the time you finish watching this movie.  By my count, they play snippets of it on four separate occasions.  Streets are calling, indeed.

Anyway, time for this movie's plot to (finally) get rolling.  April - who despite her magenta-colored jeans is actually quite the looker - brings a new boyfriend home.  Most amazing?  New boyfriend is played by Billy "Jerkass Guy from Titanic" Zane.  After eating dinner at the brown household, Zane (and yeah, his name is "Steve" in the screenplay, but I refuse to call him anything else) is coerced by April into heading out to the cozy family barn for some rolling around in the hay foreplay.  One thing that struck me about this movie instantly after discovering it all these years later - you can DEFINITELY tell that they were shooting for a family audience with Critters, because (a) there's no nudity in this scene, and (b) this is the LONGEST "make out/foreplay" scene in movie history.  The action cuts away numerous times from this, and, all added up, this probably goes on for 15 minutes.  Yikes.  What a teaser that April is.

Somewhere in the countryside, the crites (finally) land in a nearby field, and promptly make their first kill - the dopey local deputy.  It isn't a very creative murder, although we get some semblance of their prowess.  They can roll up into little balls and shoot "poison quills" at unsuspecting foes that render them helpless and/or unconscious.  Gather up a bunch of these things together, and you might have enough for an '80s horror movie. 

The plot continues to unspool as the crites make their way toward the Brown residence, immediately cutting the power and trapping Jay, Helen, and Scott inside.  One of them has already made himself at home in the basement, royally roughing up Jay as we finally get an obscured look at them.  Amazingly enough, we're about halfway through the movie by this point, and we still haven't really seen them - the picture above is pretty much the extent of it.  They DO come across as very menacing due to these fleeting glimpses, however - rows of big, snarling teeth combined with rolling power and the ability to snarl obscenities via the magic of subtitles.  Yup.

The flick's bodycount soon rises just above the minimum standard for a horror film, as one of the crites interrupts the AFOREMENTIONED longest makeout scene in movie history.  Since this IS a family horror film and the slutty-yet-virtuous daughter is off limits, that means that it's curtain time for Zane, baby.  THIS death is a bit more entertaining, as we are treated to the sight of the Phantom getting his finger bitten off before the thing attacks and eats his stomach, accompanied by a whole lot of girly screaming.  Anyway, Brad runs in and saves the day by throwing a firecracker at the hungry crite, who promptly eats it and collapses after it explodes.

Have I mentioned that we've been treated to a bunch of comedic skits involving the bounty hunters searching for the crites?  Well, we have.  This aspect of the movie is actually loads of fun.  One would expect the film-makers to take a serious approach with these guys, but instead of being badass alien trackers, they're essentially trigger-happy goofballs who like to blow stuff up just because they can.  My favorite involves Ug (the guy who transformed into Terrence Mann/Johnny Steele) picking up a bowling ball and casually flinging it toward a group of pins with such velocity that it shatters said pins.  One of the better "WTF" moments in the realm of horror, I must say.

The Brown family make their way back inside the house, where the movie essentially calms down a little bit and becomes Night of the Living Dead with little rolling balls of doom in the place of zombies.  While Jay, Helen and April fend off attacks from the crites inside the house, Brad makes a run for it, eventually making his way to the bounty hunters and setting us up for the final showdown.

As far as final showdowns go, it's not too shabby, either.  We finally get to see Ug and Lee blast a few of the crites to smithereens with their gigantic energy weapons, and the makeup effects don't skimp on the details.  There's lots of exploding chunks and splattery crite gore to be had in this movie.  It's only in the human death where we kind of get screwed.  The movie also doesn't disappoint in the action aspect, as Ug and Lee blow the holy hell out of the Brown residence during the shootout.  Thus, again - Michael Bay and Stephen Summers take note.  THIS is how you make the most of your budget.

Anyway, upon the arrival of the hunters, the crites roll back to their ship to regroup while the largest of them kidnaps April.  I don't know - do you really need me to spell out that the good guys win?  Well, they do.  Brad sneaks into the ship and rescues April, and after escaping, he and Charlie get the honorary "ultimate savior" honors, throwing a homemade molotov cocktail concocted from Charlie's whiskey that he (constantly) carts around onboard.  And...that's pretty much it.  The crites take off, they blow up the Brown household just because they can, and their ship explodes, presumably killing all furry, toothy monsters onboard. 

I also need to point out that Critters contains one of the best denounments in horror history.  The bounty hunters give Brad - having already adopted him as a surrogate little brother after spending all of ten minutes of screen time with him - this sort of magical walkie-talkie item, with Ug/Johnny Steele smiling one of the goofiest movie smiles of all time and telling our hero to "call him sometime."  As they walk away, Charlie - sick of being a laughingstock and a loser on Earth - follows them and asks them if they need a good mechanic.  It is played off in a manner that suggests mere comic relief, but since freakin' Charlie is a full-fledged bounty hunter in the next movie, apparently the application process for being an intergalatic asskicker is easier than I think. 

The icing on the cake?  We get yet another Wayne's World-approved Mega Happy Ending (man, I'm on quite a roll of upbeat horror films lately) as the Browns return to their ruined house.  On a whim, Brad presses the button on the bounty hunters' remote control device, causing their home to be rebuilt piece-by-piece in reverse stop motion.  Everyone is a better person, life is grand, and we've still got a whole host of crite eggs residing in the barn to set up possible sequels in the event that this film makes a decent return on its modest investment.  Which it did.

Final judgment: Since I'm already well aware that this review has been mammoth-sized, I'll try and make this brief.  There are some horror movies that just appeal better to kids and kid-hearted than they do to cynical adults, and this is one of them.  It's got a very different vibe from the vast majority of horror films out there, and while I don't hold it in quite the same high regard as that movie about Billy, Gizmo and Stripe that I watched over and over long ago, I still think Critters is a pretty damn fine horror movie that, yes, the whole famly can enjoy.  I love the honest, hand-made special effects, the simple country-bumpin likable characters, and the unapologetic get-right-to-the-point plot.  It appealed to me as an seven-year-old kid who liked scary flicks involving freaky-looking puppets, and it still appeals to me now.

*** 1/2 out of **** - loads of fun and highly recommended.

Ghoulies IV, featuring the return of Peter frickin' Liapis and the single most random fight scene in cinema history!

Alright, I'll just let cat out of the bag - I enjoyed Ghoulies IV.  Judging by the harsh reaction that it gets seemingly everywhere else on the interwebz, I'm one of the few (but not quite proud) souls out there who will admit to this in public.  Fans of the series just hate this movie, but for the life of me, I can't really figure out why.  Yeah, the Ghoulies barely serve a purpose in it.  Yeah, the plot is stupid and makes pretty much zero sense.  My response to this - the previous films were technically the absolute, drizzling s**t too...so your point is what, exactly?

At any rate, this is the last Ghoulies film.  And folks, I think this is one franchise that is pretty safe from the soul-stripping remake treatment, although that's also what I said about Black Christmas, so what do I know?  Still, it's difficult to imagine any genius producer out there picking up these films that all of five people (one of whom residing in the murky, eerie Lake Okabena) profess their love for, watching approximately six hours of (mostly) terrible acting, banal plotting and puppets who like to stare at hot college co-eds' mammoth funbags and seeing something commercially viable from it.  Thus, if you're a Ghoulies completionist, pick this one up and I'd wager 47 dollars that you're set for life.

The flick was unleashed on video store shelves in 1994, and is one of many, many fine craptacular horror flicks directed by Jim Wynorski.  Wynorski is one of my favorite bastions of bad cinema, having helmed the undisputed masterpiece (/Patrick Bateman) Chopping Mall along with 976-Evil II, the two Munchie films, and a whole host of Skinemax pictures and Syfy originals.  Long story short, I knew I was in for a treat seeing his name listed at the end of the credits.  Even better, this movie actually does serve as an actual, honest-to-goodness ENDING for the franchise.  It brings back Peter Liapis as Jonathan Graves, the part-time college student/part-time devil worshipper from the original film, and features a plot that, while quite moronic, does its damndest to tie up any loose ends that might be out there from the series.  All two of them.

THE MOVIE!!

Pop quiz - what is one of the Lick Ness Monster's favorite movie traits?  That's right, when it wastes absolutely no time getting going, and this is one of the reasons why horror movies rock.  Because when you've got a budget that wouldn't buy eight Whopper sandwiches, time is of the essence.  Within the first five minutes of Ghoulies IV, the impossibly hot chick in the above picture (played by Stacie Randall of Puppet Master 4 and Trancers 4-5 relative fame) bursts into one of those patented movie warehouses consisting of loads of boxes and other assorted knickknacks, kills two guards, steals a shiny red jewel, draws a pentagram on the floor, watches as a dark, shadowy figure emerges from said pentagram, and promptly messes up this whole ritual by passing the jewel inside the drawing.  Everybody got that?  After being berated by this guy (whose voice sounds like he should be telling Randall that there is no Dana, only Zuul), she receives her mission - there is ANOTHER jewel, and he needs it to become complete.  Or something.  What do you need to gleam from this?  There's a really hot girl on screen who likes to wear skin tight black leather for no apparent reason, and we're returning back to the devil worship theme of the first movie.

So begins Ghoulies IV, and within short order we're re-introduced to Jonathan Graves.  Eight years ago in the original film, he had really bad hair and liked to dabble with Satanic spells in his spare time.  Now, he's a gruff, rough and tough cop who doesn't play by the rules.  I said this in the review of the original film, but Peter Liapis is actually a really good actor; he's kind of like Michael Madsen without the 18,000-gallon daily alcohol intake requirement.  These early scenes with him establish his character as a maverick (including not just one but TWO shootouts inside convenience stores...yup, they exist), and also introduce us to his trainee, Scotty Mancuso (Bobby Di Cicco).  Remember Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters?  Well, screenwriters don't introduce characters for no reason, so keep this in mind as Scotty unleashes a whole lot of bad comedy in the early goings of this film.

Yeah.  See that dude up above?  That's Jonathan Graves, and Dirty Harry ain't got nuthin' on him.  After another in a long-line of against-the-rules shenanigans, we then meet Jonathan's Captain.  And what an interesting little number she is.  Her name is Kate, and she's played by Barbara Alyn Woods, whom the DVD box proudly proclaims is on One Tree Hill.  I'll take their word for it since I've never watched a microsecond of the show.  At one point, these two were partners in more ways than one, and throughout the movie we get all sorts of angsty arguments between them that actually come across WAY better than one would expect in a movie like this.  To give you an indication of the material we're dealing with here, one of Kate's main complaints is that she thought "handcuffs were meant to restrain criminals and not to spice up your sex life!"  Liapis and Woods have excellent chemistry, and as a result, these scenes form a nice little emotional center of the film. 

Periodically, the action switches back to the hot chick in black leather, whom we find out from the Gatekeeper-voiced hooded dude is named Alexandra.  To be perfectly clear, a lot of these scenes are just filler.  What we can gleam from them is that she is attempting to bring devil dude over from the netherworld into the real world, where all sorts of s**t disturbing is likely to take place.  It might not be said, but it's strongly implied.

Since this movie IS called Ghoulies IV, you might be wondering where the pint-sized fun-loving demons are.  Well, they're here - they cross over into the real world at the beginning of the film when Alexandra's first ritual fails, and spend the rest of the movie making bad jokes, stowing away in vehicles, and attempting to get back to hell.  They also LOOK quite a bit different than they did in the previous installments, having morphed from semi-mobile puppets to dwarves in devil costumes.  They contribute absolutely nothing to the plot, and this is one of the many aspects of this film that fans routinely harp on.  My reaction?  Meh.  Yeah, their scenes are stupid, but they're pretty damn harmless.  So suck it up, Poindexter.

Lo and behold, it's Jonathan and Kate who wind up investigating the warehouse murder scene, where Jonathan recognizes not only the Pentagram but a peculiar painting outside the warehouse.  This brings back all sorts of bad old memories, as well as a whole lot o' anguish and emotional pain wracking his inner being.  If you're wondering where a lot of the 84 minutes' worth of running time of Ghoulies IV went, it's right here, as the two cops go back and forth between a few murder scenes and Jonathan debates whether or not to tell his old flame about his demonic past. 

There's another principal character that I need to introduce you to - Jonathan's current girlfriend, a hooker named Jeanine (Raquel Krelle) who is almost as tired of Jonathan's narcoleptic sleepiness as Kate was/is.  Seriously, Jonathan dozes off with such frequency in this movie that one has to wonder if he doesn't suffer from some previously unknown kind of chemical brain imbalance that prevents his brain matter from being able to recharge as well as a normal human being.  I know that he drinks a lot, but still.  After passing out before some celebratory sex can be had, Jeanine steals the object that the film's plot cruxes on - the OTHER jewel seen in the movie's prologue that Alexandra wants oh-so-badly - and, just because it's so red and shiny, begins wearing it around her neck.  The Law of Economy of Characters strikes again!

And it strikes AGAIN in short order.  After waking up and seeing his prostitute girlfriend off, Jonathan is called to yet ANOTHER box-laden warehouse by Scotty.  Did I mention that Alexandra had appeared to him in his car and entranced him into doing her bidding?  Well, she did, and this is a trap that Admiral Ackbar himself would be damn proud of.  Jonathan and Alexandra exchange threats before she unleashes Scotty on him.  All appears lost until Jonathan remembers his devil-infused powers, and defeats his bewitched partner by shooting blue lasers out of his fingertips.  Yes, sir, that's what he does.

Jonathan finally comes clean to Kate after this incident, and it's here where we get a bit more background.  In the time frame following the first film but before he presumably entered a law enforcement program, Jonathan and Alexandra used to date, engaging in blood sports, black magic and all other forms of debauchery.  I'll give it to Jonathan Graves - he knows how to get him some poon.  Eventually, Jonathan grew out of the phase, but, in his own words, "Alexandra couldn't get enough."  Eventually, she tried to kill him, which led him to commit her to a mental institution and leaving her with a nasty and decidedly anti-human disposition.  The dark lord of the Sith that she worships is in reality the embodiment of Jonathan's dark side, and getting the gem means bringing dark Jonathan - named Faust, cleverly enough - into the real world and banishing real Jonathan to Hades.  End exposition.

Since evil demonic twins and Pentagram-infused rituals are starting to pick up in frequency, it's time to enter the movie's final trimester.  In one of the finer plot copouts I've seen, Alexandra sacrifices a random extra to Faust and is able to decipher the location of the gem.  Within minutes, she has tricked and kidnapped Jeanine, which is a fine bonus for us the film viewer as Alexandra carries Jeanine over her shoulder like a burlap sack, affording us several nice looks at her panties in the process.  Double secret bonus to the movie here.

Through some convoluted way, Jonathan and Kate are able to figure out the location of the final ritual - the very mental institution that he dumped her off at after deciding that Hot Topic-style Paganism wasn't for him.  And after ditching Kate and making his way there, we get perhaps the single greatest scene in movie history, as Jonathan is ambushed by a lady in red whom we have never seen before and a gigantic sumo wrestling-style fighter.  I could post a lengthy blow-by-blow of this scene, but suffice to say, this is one you have to see for yourself.  It's SO inexplicable and out of nowhere that any recap will just spoil it.  Take my word - Jonathan Graves vs. Imposing Sumo Wrestler Guy is comedic GOLD.

Out in the institution's courtyard, Alexandra has Jeanine tied to a ceremonial altar, and soon enough is able to swap Jonathan with Faust for the officially-sanctioned sacrifice that will spell victory for the bad guys - until Kate shows up.  It's here where the Ghoulies finally get to do something (YAY!), snatching the gem from around Jeanine's neck and tossing them to Kate.  Somehow, our heroine also knows that she can shoot energy blasts out of the gem, promptly blasting both Alexandra and Faust to hell, opening a porthole in the process where real Jonathan and Scotty reappear.  Since this is the final movie in the series, and clearly shoots for the Wayne's World-approved Mega Happy Ending, Jonathan and Kate rekindle their love, and there's no need to feel bad for street walker Jeanine, either, since she finds a quick rebound in Scotty.

Then, in what is legit a pretty damn good moment for the series, the Ghoulies themselves wave goodbye to the audience, telling us that they will be back in Ghoulies IV Part II

Ordinarily, this is where your humble host goes off on some big long-winded soliloquy and puts on a whole bunch of masturbatory smart guy armor to give hard-hitting analysis of the movie in question...but really, what more do you need to know?  As stated numerous times already, the flick was absolutely napalmed by pretty much everyone who saw it, but I don't really see what the huge problems are.  It's got two very good performances from Liapis and Woods, genuinely likable characters, and a simultaneously fun and ridiculous plot that somehow manages to feel like a fitting sendoff for the series.  I'll take that over a Twilight reboot featuring a guy from The Social Network any day.  Thus, I'll give this one *** 1/2 out of **** for all the wrong reasons - pop this one in on a rainy day and you won't be disappointed.

Well, that effectively ends the Ghoulies saga in the life of the Lick Ness Monster, so what monster hunter is lined up with a harpoon and oxygen barrels now?  Well, let's just say that in the power of the night...streets are calling...