Weirdhouse Cinema: Critters

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1986 sci-fi creature feature “Critters,” starring Dee Wallace, M. Emmet Walsh, Billy Zane, Terrence Mann and a bunch of ravenous space creatures. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
on today's episode of Weird House Cinema, we are going
to be talking about the nineteen eighty six sci fi
creature feature Critters. I was going to say it's our
first example from the Gromlins subgenre, but it is not.
We've actually talked we did Grimlins two last year, that

(00:36):
we haven't done Grimlins one. And also I think you
covered a sort of Gromlin's adjacent movie while I was
out last year.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, my friend David Streepy came on the show and
we talked about the Gate, which, as we'll discuss here,
is gromlin esque without being like a like a hard
Gromlin or direct Gromlin feature.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
But if it's okay with you, I thought maybe we
should start this episode by laying out a sort of
filmographic timeline of the Gromlin subgenre, or what you might
also call like tiny monster movies or small creature features.
These were very popular in American cinema in the nineteen eighties,
and maybe by kind of laying them out in order

(01:20):
we can help get at what these films mean.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, yeah, because Gromlins are always fascinating, like trying to
figure out like how they work, why they work, you
know why Grimlins spawned so many imitators, and not just imitators,
but also, as with this movie, I think Legitimate clearly
had an influence on films that had their own ideas
and had something different to offer, but still delivers on

(01:46):
that same energy and rides that Gromlin wave.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
That's right. Okay, So the first big one is Grimlins
nineteen eighty four. This is the mac Daddy. We covered
Gremlins two already, as I said, but not the original.
So the Grimlins are small monsters that are spawned as
a result of improper pet care. So they begin as
a cute, friendly, fuzzy little guy called a Magway. And

(02:12):
the Magua is great. He's a good buddy, but you
absolutely positively cannot get him wet, and unfortunately the humans
in the movie spill some water on their maguai, spawning
other creatures like him. They kind of pop off of
his back, but they're not exactly like him. They're not nice,
they're mean, and these creatures are made even worse when

(02:33):
another rule is violated and they are fed after midnight,
which the characters are told not to do. That transforms
the Mean Magway from just little trickster type things into
dull sized, scaly, reptilian chaos demons that exist to mock
and destroy all systems of order and organization, including human

(02:55):
life itself. But as we talked about in our feature
on Green Rimlins two, the Grimlins do kill people in
these movies, yes, but what makes them special as monsters
is that killing people is not their main goal. It's
just one small part of their broader raisondetra, which is

(03:15):
to make a mess. Grimlins exist to make a mess.
They are chaos embodied and this goes back to their
origin in folklore from before the film. The standard idea
of where Grimlins came from is that British raf pilots
in World War Two would blame engine malfunctions on Grimlins.
They imagine little monsters that would get into the engines

(03:37):
of the aircraft and chew through wires, disconnect things, and
cause malfunctions.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, and in general, I would say the folkloric roots
of the Grimlin, or the basic Gromlin is yeah, any
kind of diminutive trickster being. So there's a whole host
of things that you can hold up to the light
as being in the same vein. I think, like the
basic that's one of the reasons Grimlins connects so well

(04:03):
with an audience when it comes out is because this
is not something we haven't seen before to some degree,
and say cartoons, it's not something out of keeping with
folkloric traditions, and so we instantly latch onto it. I
would argue the other thing that really helps with Grimlins
and the more successful Grimlins imitators, even the bad ones,

(04:25):
is that there is a handcrafted puppet quality to a
true Gromlin, where you know it's a puppet, you know
it's an artificial being that's being brought to life via
generally some sort of puppeteering, and that adds to the
effect and also makes the scares a little safer, and
it creates this special energy that is very consumable by

(04:49):
a mass audience.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
I think that's a various due to observation, and I
want to come back to that when we talk about
the appeal of these movies. Okay, but so Grimlins is
the first one that's eighty four. Second main one that
most people recognize is Ghoulies, which came out either in
eighty four or eighty five. I've seen both year cited
for its release, maybe in different markets, I don't know.
It does seem to have come after Grimlins, because multiple

(05:13):
reviews at the time call it a Grimlins ripoff. However,
it seems these two movies were in development at the
same time, so I haven't done a deep dive on this,
but I think it appears that Goolies was not just
like looking at the success of Grimlins and saying, let's
do something like that.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
We will have to watch a Gholies movie someday. Goolies.
If you're not familiar, and if you're not famili it's
almost hard for me to believe because having grown up
as a child in the eighties going to VHS and
later DVD rental stores, but especially VHS rental stores and
seeing the box art and or posters for Goolies, it

(05:51):
was horrifying because the VHS box art promises one thing,
Goolies will crawl up through the toilet and bite you
in the butt. They are That is the threat that
is promised on the VHS I'm not saying the movie
completely delivers on that concept, but this is just indetachable
from the franchise.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
The main box art is a green, bald Gholie creature
wearing I don't know, like red suspenders and a blue
T shirt. I don't know what this outfit means, but
it's this green bald creature with sharp teeth popping up
out of a toilet bowl with its hands on the seat,
and the tagline is they'll get you in the end.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
I wish they mean the butt. Yeah. Yeah, so horrifying
as a kid, because this is not what you want
when to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
Not at all though. So it's been many years since
I saw Gholies. I have only the vaguest memories about it,
but I recall this not actually being a thing that
happens in the movie. Am I right about that?

Speaker 2 (06:52):
I think you're right. My memory too, is kind of
an amalgam of different bits from Goolies movies I watched
on like late night cable television. I think it might
not have been a thing in the first film, and
or it might have been like, oh god, we put
a Gooli coming out of a toilet on the vhs R.
Let's throw in a scene. It might even something like that.
I think by the second film they're definitely making sure

(07:13):
they get some some toilet humor in there. Well.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
The general idea is that this is also a movie
with small monsters running around a house killing people, but
rather than being an improper pet care situation gone awry,
the small monsters in Ghoulies are servants of the devil.
They are summoned by an occult ritual to do the
bidding of a malevolent Satanic sorcerer.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yes, they're demons for sure.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Which certainly seems like a more evil and adult kind
of spin on the small monster's idea than in Grimlins.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, because Grimlins there, Yeah, they're pets, they're vaguely some
sort of creature out of Chinese fantasy. But yeah, this
time servants of the Yeah, you have to take that
a lot more seriously because you know that they're underlings
for something else, something worse.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
Okay, the next big Grumblins movie on the timeline is
the one we're talking about today, Critters from nineteen eighty six.
How is this one different? Well, the small monsters here
are not not little chaos goblins from you know that
sound like something out of a folk tale with little
pet care rules. They're also not servants of Satan. They
are science fiction alien fugitives from an asteroid prison, and

(08:30):
they are here to eat. Their main quality, the main
quality possessed by the Crites, as they are called in
the film, is that they are hungry and they will
eat anything and anyone that's right.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
And I would describe them as being kind of little
round guys, kind of in the vibe of a cartoon porcupine,
but then with just a shark's mouth of teeth, ruby
red eyes. But they still have that, they still have attitude.
They have that kind of Grimlin's energy where they they're hungry.

(09:02):
They're mainly here to eat, but they're up for a
little mischief as well.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
They're little humanoid hedgehogs that shoot poison quills and have
at least three rows of little thornlike teeth. Yeah, and
mean nasty eyes and they're like they're vindictive.

Speaker 4 (09:17):
They're mean, yeah, but a little bit cute, A little
bit cute, a little bit cute too.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah. Now, the poster art for this one is also
pretty incredible. I remember this one from the video stores
of old because you have this wonderful illustration of a krite,
and I don't know if it's a one hundred percent
accurate representation of what they look like in the film,
but it captures the energy, it captures the mischief in Hunger.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
I agree. So when you showed me this picture the
poster before we watched the movie, I was thinking, Oh, wow,
this is one of those great things where the monster
on the box art is fully revealed and it looks
awesome and is somewhat misleading, Like, it looks a lot
different than it does in the movie. Actually, once I
watched the the movie, I was like, it's not as
misleading as I first thought. It's basically on track. You know,

(10:05):
the eyes are a different color and stuff, but there
is some kind of energy that's different. This monster is
just kind of classier looking.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah, it looks like he needs a little suit or something. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Also, when you shared the poster with me and chat it,
it cropped it so that the title at the bottom
was just Ritter.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Ritter versus Critter. Was one of the great missed opportunities
of this franchise.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
Oh yeah, problem child with Critters. Yeah, all right, but
that gets us up to nineteen eighty six. It did
not stop there. And by the way, we're not noting these,
but there are sequels popping up as we go along
to it, So you're gonna also get Grimlins two Gholies,
two Goolies, three, Critters two and so forth. But in
nineteen eighty seven we get Muncheese. This one is produced

(10:50):
by our old pal, Roger Korman. Allegedly he was like, hey,
you know these Grimlin ripoffs, they're making money. Let's do one.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, these other films as well, as we'll discuss with
Critters as well. You know, there are alternate takes on
it where they're like, well, this was already an idea
and we just tweaked it a little bit. But this
is Corman. You know what's up here.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, he's like, let's do a Grimlins clone. So Munchies
was directed by Tina Hirsch. The plot concerns a man
who brings a creature that he finds in a cave
in Peru back to the United States, and the problem
seems to come when someone tries to chop the creature
in half and it just turns into two creatures and
so on and so on. So it's like it's like

(11:32):
Grimlins meets the Legend of the Hydra.

Speaker 5 (11:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, And I've never seen this one, but the box
art is familiar to me because you basically have what
looks like a cross between a Grimlin and one of
those trolls with the spiky hair treasure trolls. Yeah. Yeah,
looks like a treasure troll and a Grimlin had a
baby and then that baby took up drinking beer and
smoking cigarettes.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Yes, and it's a pervert. That's the main thing you
need understand from the poster is it's like perven on ladies.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah. I don't know if they I mean, I assume
this happens in the movie, who knows, But that's what
they're selling. It's like, we're the Grimlins, too tame for you.
Do you want Raunchy or Grimlins, Well, then meet the Munchies.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
So I've never seen Munchies either, but I found a
screenshot and Rob, is it just me? Or are the
Munchies dressed like the Bounty hunters in Critters kind of?

Speaker 2 (12:24):
They have some sort of weird futuristic doll clothing on,
don't they.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah, similar color scheme that kind of underlying sort of
red brown clay color and then like the black stuff
on top. I don't know, it looks similar to me.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Looks like the puppetry has slid a bit from the
titles we've discussed already and is moving closer to the
title that we're going to discuss next.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
The next movie from nineteen eighty eight is Hobgoblins, famous
for Mystery Science Theater three thousand. The origin of the
monsters here is that they crash landed from space, and
then they were kept locked in a vault in a
movie studio for decades. Now they have escaped, so it's
aliens again. This one feels more like it is ripped
from the plot of critters aliens crashing on Earth.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Hobgoblins is, of course terrific, just a terrific film. Yeah,
I mean, it's one of the great episodes of ms
T three k. It's a perfect film for riffing on,
though it also inherently has its own built in campiness
and intentional humor, some of which lands. Some of it
falls fantastically flat. But when it does fall flat, it

(13:32):
flands in such a way that it can then be
riffed upon and enjoyed.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
I haven't watched this one in a while either, but
I remember it having a great quality of scenes that
go on way too long and become very funny.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah yeah, yeap, you get all sorts of cool. So yeah,
clubs what clubscum? I think they go to clubscum in that.

Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yeah, m okay. So that's just a selection of the
main ones that came to my mind. I think those
are the main franchises you're going to get, are like
Gholi's Critters and Grimlins, but there are some other like
one offs in between there and addition to all the sequels.
So there were a lot of these movies and they
made a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah yeah, And I think you can kind of divide
them up. I kind of divide them up into thinking
about like direct Gromlins and indirect Gromlins. So the direct
ones are going to be pretty much the films we've
already listed, Goolies, Munchies, Hobgoblins, you know, easy to point
out and say, hey, if I liked Grimlins, I might
like that, et cetera. But indirect Gromlins are going to

(14:30):
be situations where you have things in common with Grimlins,
and they're still likely to be cash ins to some degree.
If not creative cash ins. Then in many of these cases,
like clearly somebody with the money to finance that. Well,
this is a great idea because we know these sorts
of films actually so. But you may have different things
going on. For instance, you might have the effects leaning

(14:52):
more into monster suits as opposed to shrieking puppets, and
you also might see greater originality in some cases. So
for example, the Troll movies are sometimes mentioned as being
Grimlin's ripoffs. And you know, I don't know that I've
ever watched the first Troll all the way through, but
we talked about Troll two on here. Troll two definitely

(15:12):
has Grimlin energy going on, but the creatures are not
brought to life in such a way. The creatures are
clearly people in costumes that actually comes off more threatening
because the costumes are so bad.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
I agree in a way, I don't know if I
would put Troll two in the Gromlins category, because like
the trolls or the goblins, Oh yeah, that's right, they're goblins,
not trolls. Yeah, they're people in suits, like, they're not
the like the dull sized creatures running around, you know,
causing mayhem like that, and they've got a different mo
they they're not as mischievous, you know, as the creatures

(15:53):
in all the Gromlins movies are. They just want to
turn you into plant matter and eat you.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Another film that comes to mind is nineteen eighty five's
Cat's Eye, which was of course a horror anthology film
based on works by Stephen King, and the title story
in it concerns a little troll creature who is It
comes out of the hole in the wall to suck
out a child's breath at night while they sleep, and

(16:19):
the cats are of course blamed for it, but the
cat is like one of the direct lines of defense
against said troll.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Yeah, the cat has to save the day. I saw
that movie when I was way too young to see it,
and it scared me.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, it's a scary looking creature. I think this one
they mostly did with a costume though, but with really
awesome gigantic sets, so the effects I think are really admirable.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
Here. Okay, another thing that's notable in the Gromlin space,
while it's not a movie, is I think best seen
as part of the cultural phenomenon of Gromlins, and that
would be Boglins, released in nineteen eighty seven, a popular
line of monster themed hand puppets for kids. You turn
your hand into a goblin, Rob, did you have Boglins

(17:04):
or do you know what I'm talking about? Oh?

Speaker 2 (17:05):
I definitely know what you're talking about. I never had one,
but I wanted one at the time. These were created
by Tim Clark, who also worked on The Dark Crystal
and Fraggle Rock and the Creature and Muppet design areas.
For instance, he was on the team that created the
mystics for The Dark Crystal and I think I follow
him on Instagram because he's brought Boglins back. They've recreated them,

(17:30):
new materials and new designs for a new generation. I
would totally buy one if it were the kind of
thing that my son enjoyed at all. But I would
just be buying it for me, which feels which which
I don't feel strongly enough to do.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
Rob, you can buy it for you. It's okay, I
give you permission.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
I only have so much room for fake monsters in
the house, you know. And it's just I'm gonna have
to let somebody else buy that Boglin and love it
well anyway.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
With this whole tiny Monster is phenomenon the Gromlins craze.
I started thinking, why was this a Why was this
such a thing at the time and place it was.
Why did groups of tiny, rampaging monsters with mischievous personalities
become such a phenomenon in American movies in the mid

(18:18):
nineteen eighties? Like, what about this theme resonated? I think,
I don't know this, This is still kind of only
half formed in my mind, but I think there is
something significant in the fact that these monsters are, in
their very essence like toys somehow, they are already merchandise

(18:41):
marketed to kids in their original form, but they're dangerous
and pretty close to R rated. So there's a kind
of ambiguity about the intended audience of a number of
these movies. The original Grimlins. I don't know if so
much for Gholies, but the original Grimlins and Critters. These
are movies that, on one hand, if you watch them,

(19:02):
you'd say, well, I guess this is supposed to be
a regular horror movie for adults only, because you know,
they're pretty violent and they have some adult themes. But
they're also on the tamer end of adult horror movies,
and they have elements that seem like maybe they're supposed
to appeal to kids, Like the fact that the monsters
are little makes them seem kind of cute in a way,

(19:25):
even the ones that are more ugly, and in some
cases these monsters explicitly have cute avatars. Allow the Magwi
in Gremlins or Critters also are They're somewhere between scary
and cute. They are a little bit cute. Yeah, And
I wonder if this led to it seeming like kids
could maybe be allowed to watch these movies like Critters

(19:46):
is PG thirteen. It's not rated R, but it's a
rough PG thirteen. And of course a lot of kids,
you know, they love monsters. They love if the parents
will let them watch a scary, bloody monster movie, they'll
be into it. So maybe something about the ability of
these movies to defy marketing and content restriction pipelines and

(20:07):
end up in front of audiences that were technically too
young for them was part of the success. What do
you think about that?

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, I mean, just looking back on my own childhood,
it seemed like a time when more kids were watching
films without a lot of parent parental supervision, and so
there was more room for films like this to sort
of be gateways into other franchises of horror, And I
don't know, I guess it's kind of weird though, to

(20:35):
think about them, because on one hand, like you're saying,
they're not like Disney Family films like you would rent
during this time period, but they're not like really really
hard horror with like really strong adult themes. They are
this kind of like transitional place where kids could watch
it and feel like they're breaking the rules a little bit,
but at the same time, like a parental unit might

(20:58):
watch this and see and like, well, it's fine, it's fine.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
It's not too bad. Yeah, another possible part of the appeal.
I was talking to Rachel about this, and we were
wondering if maybe the movies are appealing to adults because
the monsters are in some sense kids. So we were
talking about whether it's possible that, like maybe a certain

(21:22):
generation of filmmakers and audiences, we're all having kids around
around the same time, and of course, you know, we
love our kids, but there is sometimes a great temptation
to imagine our children in their more destructive moods, as
rampaging little monsters that have gotten loose in your house,
and I can see how that could be part of
the appeal. But of course earlier generations of filmmakers and

(21:45):
audiences would have been having similar experiences becoming parents and
watching their children unleash a flood of chaos through the home.
So that still does leave us back with the question
of like, what was so special about this theme in
the mid nineteen eighties.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Yeah, I like it. I think part of it is materials.
It's the fact that they had to lean on puppetry
and the puppetry in the creature effects of other forms.
They had to be pretty darn good, even in these
cases where where we may laugh at the execution, like hobgoblins.
I mean still hobgoblins look pretty good. Maybe not on

(22:21):
the same level as Critter, is much less grimlins to grimlins,
but they still look pretty good. You can buy into them.
And part of that is just the sublime magic of
puppetry as a storytelling medium. A puppet does not have
to look one hundred life like because the puppeteer breathes
life into it, and that's where the magic happens.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
I think that's a very good point, though of course
you cite the example of Grimlins too, which has amazing
puppetry but also goes well beyond puppetry. And I don't
know whatever they were doing with electricity Grimlin. I think
that was like animation on film or something.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yeah, yeah, I mean some of these other like the
Gate comes to mind, like they are little demon creatures
running around in there, and they use multiple different forms
of special effects to bring those to life, include stop
motion stop motion, but also people in suits and so forth.
So you know it's it's gonna vary you're gonna end up.

(23:17):
Even in this one, there are cases where it's puppetry,
and there are cases where it's clearly like a ball
of fur that people off off screen or rolling across
across the set.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, I think you might really be onto something about
that with the with the effects that like the tactile
nature and size of the effects, and also that may
connect in a way to what I was saying a
minute ago about the the facts that these monsters are
already in their original form, so similar to toys, which
might have some kind of like merchandising appeal or something.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
This movie actually touches on one possible connection, and that
is e t Yeah, this film features one of those,
and I definitely remember these from my childhood. I never
had one, but it's like this kind of like Naga
Hyde sort of et plush. That was very weird because, yeah,
it's not completely huggable, like it's not soft, that it

(24:11):
doesn't have fur, and it's based on Et, which I
was thinking about watching this film. It's like Et is
of course a classic film, very influential. You know, it
wouldn't have works like Pod People without it. But on
the other hand, it seems like the creature design is
one of the limiting factors of ET, because Et is
just ugly. Et is not cuddly, and you have to like,

(24:33):
they did a great job creating even a like an
acceptable stuffy based on him. But yeah, you can't help
but wonder what would Et be even have been even
more successful? Would it kind of like have have even
more lasting influence if the creature had looked differently.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
I think part of the beauty of Et is the
idea that you have to see past what Et looks like,
that you get to know that this is a this
is a friendly, benevol creature, and when you get to
know his personality, Et becomes beautiful but he's not like
when you just look at him, he's not cuddly looking.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
No, he looks like a coat rack, the coat rack
made out of like naked flesh.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
He also kind of looks like a like a stalagmite
in a way.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, yeah he does.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Oh but yeah, you were you were mentioning. There's a
scene with an ET toy in the movie and the
critter or the crite is trying to like communicate with it.
It's like booping it, being like, hey, what's up, buddy,
But the et does not talk back, So the crit
becomes annoyed and I think just bites its head off.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, yeah, it just bites into it. All right, Joe,
what's your elevator pitch for this one?

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Well you probably already know by this point, but he
basically furry little creatures which are also vindictive sentient fugitives
from space jail land in a sleepy Midwest farm village
and begin to eat everything in sight, and it is
up to two alien bounty hunters and a brave young
pyromaniac to stop them.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
All right, let's listen to that trailer audio.

Speaker 6 (26:10):
Of all the planets in the galaxy, they chose ours,
They hide in small places.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
This phone is dead.

Speaker 6 (26:24):
What they light the dark?

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Ju just a minute.

Speaker 6 (26:31):
There's nothing cute about them all. They've come a long
way and they're hungry Internet, and they're getting bigger.

Speaker 5 (27:18):
Critters they bite, all right, If you want to go
watch Critters for yourself, well, it's widely available and currently
as of this recording, streaming along with only Critters three
on Max.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
I don't know what David Zaslov has against Critters two
and Critters four, but I don't think they are streaming
alongside Critters one and Critters three. Masks.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
Yeah, yeah, Max, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (27:50):
But if they're out there somewhere, they're not unavailable. And
there is also an excellent looking Critters collection Blu ray
box set, which features Critters one through four with extras.
All right, let's get into the people involved here. The

(28:12):
director and one of the screenwriters on this is Stephen
Herrick born nineteen fifty eight, accomplished mainstream Texan born director
who launched his career with this film in nineteen eighty six.
He followed it up on a debut Yeah. I mean,
I mean, I think it's a it's a well executed film. Yeah,
and it's very watchable, very enjoyable. So it's not a

(28:35):
bad way to start off at all.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
I'm not fully being ironic when I say I can
see the line from Critters to mister Holland's Opus.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yes, because yeah, he goes on to do a number
of films that I would just roughly describe as feel good. Yeah,
there are a lot of feel good elements in this
particular film, and you can totally see that being something
that he, you know, he took up and ran with
and made a career out of, because they absolutely were.
And the score also goes along with it. The score

(29:04):
is great at times in ways that I really like.
Other times it has that kind of comedy energy where
it's like this summer, are you ready for the adventure
of a lifetime? The Critters are on the move, you
know that kind of thing. Ran odd, no, dear, Yeah,
but anyway, more in the score in a minute, anyway. Yeah.

(29:25):
He followed this movie up with eighty nine's Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure Ooh, and did especially well fro himself
in the nineties, directing stuff like The Mighty Ducks in
ninety two, The Three Musketeers in ninety three, which was
very nineties, but also had tremendous cast mister Hollins, Ope
is like you said in ninety five one hundred and
one Dalmatians in ninety six. His subsequent work includes a

(29:48):
lot of mainstream television two Dolly Parton specials, as well
as the twenty twenty three movie Dog Gone, which I
think is a movie about a lost dog.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Oh no, well, I hope they get dog back.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Oh, you know, they get the dog back.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Of course, I know this guy's vibe. Now, Yeah, they'll
get the dog backed, and Dolly Parton will show up
at the end and sing a song and everybody's kind.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah. I mean that. You know, I'm not knocking to
people need movies like that. Someone's going to make them,
and and this guy's got the skills to do it.
I haven't seen most of them, but they seem fine now.
Early in his career as an editor, he also worked
on such films as eighty two's The Slumber Party, Massacre Android,
which is a Kloskinski space movie, Space Raiders in nineteen

(30:33):
eighty four City Limits. When when he's been asked about critters,
it's my understanding. He's also he's pointed out that Critters
was conceived prior to Grimlins, but that they actually went
back in and like had like, they changed it around
a bit to make sure that they weren't too close
to the Grimlins format, So it sounds reasonable to me now.
One of the other writers on this is Dominic Muir,

(30:54):
who lives Live nineteen sixty two through twenty ten. This
is his earliest credit on a produced screenplay, but he
went on to work on scripts for such movies as
two thousand and five, The Ginger dead Man.

Speaker 5 (31:06):
OH.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Two and six is Evil Bong and the rest of
the Evil Bong movies. All of these are definitely their
own thing. But I think these movies, along with other
full Moon entertainment style fairs such as like puppet Master
and so forth, I think those are all kind of

(31:28):
in the shadow of Grimlins as well. Those aren't necessarily creatures,
but they're you know, evil, vindictive puppet type things running
around killing people.

Speaker 3 (31:39):
I haven't enjoyed many a Z grade movie in my time,
but I recalled The Ginger dead Man being so painful
to get through. It's like voice of Gary Busey, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, he's somehow. I haven't seen them, but he's somehow
involved with these pictures. Yeah, yeah, he's the He's in
that one. And then Tommy Chong is involved with the
Evil Bong franchise, as is Rabbit.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Oh okay, I'd watch it just for Rabbit.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
All right. Moving into the cast here. Top billing on
this one is d Wallace aka d Wallace Stone, playing
Helen Brown, the mom. This is an actor born in
nineteen forty eight. She's been a lot of TV and
film over the years, but really established herself as a
sci fi and horror staple. Her credits include The Stepford
Wives from seventy five, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes

(32:31):
from seventy seven, The Howling from eighty one, Et from
eighty two, Kujo from eighty three. In nineteen ninety, she
was an alligator to The Mutation, Popcorn in ninety one,
and a whole string of more recent films. A lot
of times you'll have hard directors working today kind of
bring her back in, you know, in part because of

(32:51):
the nostalgia of these previous roles she had. So you'll
find her in a couple of rob zombie productions, including
The Lords of Salem. She also pops up in how
in the House of the Devil, she's still very active.

Speaker 3 (33:02):
D Wallace is great as always, and you hear I
feel like you can really see her filling out the
full scale of feel good to feel bad films because
you get you know, okay, So at the full feel
good end, she's in Et. Great in that. At the
full feel bad end, she's in Kujo, just one of
the nastiest, most depressing horror movies ever. And then here

(33:22):
I'd say Critters is right in the middle. It's right
between Et and Kujo.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah, she does a great job in this film delivering
the idea of like the brave mom in this kind
of traditional, very traditional, almost nineteen fifties household, but is
also put through extreme terror by these attacking monstrosities. Now
we'll get to the rest of her family in a second.
We're gonna go ahead and go to the next build

(33:47):
actor and that this concerns the character Harve, who's the
local sheriff played by the legendary character actor him EMMITTT. Walsh.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
So when we were trying to decide what movie to
feature for this week, we saw that m Emmett Walsh
was in Critters, and I it was brought to my
mind that Roger Ebert had a rule. He said that
he thought that no film, I think I'm getting this right,
no film featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or m Emmett
Walsh could be entirely bad. And I was like, but

(34:17):
I bet he broke that rule with critters and gave
it a one star. Nope, three stars for critters. He
liked critters.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, he whn't it's crazy about critics too, but he
liked critters one. I should also add, in trying to
decide which film to cover, here were and I've encountered
this conundrum before with the Critters franchise is where do you?
Where do you go? Because all four films have the
critters in them, and each one has someone involved in
it that makes it seem irresistible, Like I mean, this

(34:46):
one you have m m At Walsh and it's the
first movie I think it's two is You has David
Towey working on the script, and then also Leonardo DiCaprio's
perhaps his film debut I don't recall off hand, and
in a later version of what I think, four has
Brad Doriff and Angela Bassett in it.

Speaker 3 (35:05):
So oh, boy.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yeah. So you know, there's so many reasons to go
with each one, we decided to go.

Speaker 5 (35:10):
With the first one.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
Maybe we'll the next four weeks just do all of them.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how this one of the
matters for everyone. So anyway. Walsh Yes born nineteen thirty five,
still active today, legendary character actor who's been active since
the late sixties. Up through the seventies, he tended to
play smaller roles in the likes of sixty nine's Alice's Restaurant,
seventy one's Escaped from the Planet of the Apes, Cerpaco

(35:38):
in seventy three, Slapshot in seventy seven, he's the mad
Shooter in seventy nine of the Jerk. But during the
nineteen eighties he this is when he really cemented his
status as this desired character actor that is both it
can to be threatening but also very humorous and also
have this kind of like blue collar mentality he should

(35:58):
he pops up in nine he needs to do his
Blade Runner playing Bryant. This is Harrison Ford. This is
Decker's boss, right, yeah, Deckerd's boss.

Speaker 5 (36:07):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
And oh and then of course he plays private detective
Lauren Visser in the Cohen Brothers' debut nineteen eighty four
film Blood Simple. Just a marvelous, villainous performance.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
Fantastic in this role. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
He also has a fun but small role in the
nineteen eighty seven Coen Brothers film Raising Arizona. So he's
worked continuously in just any and everything, from indie pictures
to blockbusters. Can't possibly list them all here. I'll have
everyone know, though, that his episode of the nineties Outer Limits,
The Refuge, is a really good one. He also did

(36:44):
a Tales from the Crypt episode titled Collection Completed, directed
by Mary Lambert. All right, now back to the family.
We have Jay Brown the dad, a very traditional again,
kind of almost nineteen fifties dad always wants to be
working on the car in the basement, tinkering with stuff.
He's played by Billy green Bush born nineteen thirty five,

(37:05):
American character actor, whose earliest roles included an episode of
the original Outer Limits in the early sixties, but he
mostly made his name in the seventies, popping up in
films like Five Easy Pieces from nineteen seventy. His other
credits include nineteen eighty six as the Hitcher and Jason
goes to hell Oh, where he plays Sheriff Landis in

(37:25):
his final role before retiring from acting.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
What a sendoff. I can't believe it.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Wow, all right, and then of course we have our kid,
and we have a great kid in this. This is
a great child actor performance, a very fun vision of childhood.
Like this is, like you mentioned, he's a pyromaniac. He's
really into getting firecrackers and creating more powerful explosives, but
in a way that modern parents may watch and be like,

(37:52):
this was not a good idea. But at the same time,
had I seen the original Critters back in the day
as a kid, I would have loved every second of this,
because the idea of standing up to alien monsters with
your own childhood ingenuity is just instantly appealing.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Agreed in the very old fashioned picture of the main
family shown in this movie that the main character really
is like a boy with gumption. Yeah, but he's fun.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah, he's a lot of fun. He's played by Scott
Grimes born nineteen seventy one, child actor of the eighties
who continues to work in TV and film today. His
more recent credits include American Dad, The Oriville, and Oppenheimer.
He's in the cast of Oppenheimer. Okay, you have a kid,
you also need a kind of braddy older sister, a
teenage older sister, and that's what we have in April

(38:44):
Brown played by Nadine van Derveld born nineteen sixty two,
eighties teen actor who eventually transitioned into writing and producing
children's television. She has the honor of having acted in
not one, but two Gromlin's movies because she's also in
nineteen eighty seven Munchies Wow. Yeah. Her other credits include

(39:04):
eighty three's Private School, eighty eight Shadow Dancing in eighty
nine's After Midnight, a horror anthology written and directed by
Jim and Ken Wheat.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
She's also great in this, but also continues the trend
of not very surprising characterizations. She is the teenager looking
to get into trouble.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Yeah now, our next character is Charlie McFadden, who is
I guess the sort of the alcoholic geek of the
of the picture. He's kind, he's kind of an outcast,
but a likable outcast for the most part. He also
has energy that may remind one of like a Michael
Richards sort of a role you know.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah, he gives a struggling, mostly comedic performance. He is
the town drunk who is like always receiving messages from
aliens through the fillings in his teeth, he says. And
then he has proved right in the end by the
alien invasion. But he's also he plays the role very
like clumsy, like he's always you know, his bicycle's falling
over and stuff, and he's having a hard time.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah. He's played by Don Keith Opper born nineteen forty nine,
mostly known for Critter movies, but you'll also find him
in that nineteen eighty two Android film that I already referenced,
City Limits, which I also reference that's, by the way,
an MST three K film as well. He pops up
in nineteen eighty six's Black Moon Rising, and various TV projects.

(40:27):
He has a very small role in nineteen ninety three
he's ghost in the Machine, which we've previously discussed on
Weird House Cinema. Oh and then also he has an
additional additional dialogue or additional scenes credit on the script
for this picture. So I don't know, maybe he wrote
his own lines. I'm not sure what the full story
is there. Now someone who's not in All four is

(40:50):
April's boyfriend Steve. Steve is played by Billy Zay.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
Absolutely unforgivable under use of billy z Ay and Billy Zayne.
It's eaten by the crits too early, and they do
not they do not get maximum Zaine out of him.

Speaker 5 (41:06):
Yeah, I mean he's good.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
He has a little bit of you see a little
bit of the Billy Zane charm in this role. This
is only a second role, following a small part in
nineteen eighty five's Back to the Future. But yeah, it's
it's weird because they don't do a lot with him,
and this film also is just too nice to give
us like a deplorable boyfriend that we're okay with the

(41:28):
monsters eating. No, Steve seems fine.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
Yeah, Yeah, he's all right.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
He's a decent guy. He's just in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
It's funny because it feels like when we're first introduced
to him, they're setting him up to be a real jerk,
and then he's just not like he seems like a
nice guy.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Yeah, even has nice table manners. All right. We also
have Ethan Phillips in this playing a less likable character.
This is like a deputy by the name of jeff
Ethan Phillips was more nineteen fifty five. That's another exceptional character.
Actor Treki's know him best as Neelix or Neeelix. I'm

(42:06):
not sure how to pronounce this this creature, but he
was on Star Trek Voyager, which is not when I
ever watched. But his other credits include nineteen eighty seven's Werewolf,
nineteen ninety four is the Shadow, two thousand and five's
The Island. He pops up on Better Call Saul, and
he had a terrific role on Avenue five that ran

(42:26):
two seasons on HBO, where he plays veteran astronaut Spike Martin.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
In this he plays like a lazy and lovelorn police
officer who's always trying to ask out the dispatcher over
the radio.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah. Yeah, he has an unmistakable voice. It is a
lot of fun. I've enjoyed him in many things. He's
especially good again in Avenue five.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Oh but wait, we really delayed getting to one of
the great screen presences in this movie, a character with
very few lines but an unforgettable look.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
That's right talking about Ugg here. But more as we'll discuss.
Ugg is a shape shifting alien, but he takes on
the form of Johnny Steele, a rock star that the
aliens see on television.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
If this is confusing, we'll explain it in the plot section.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
So Johnny Steele and Ugg are both played by Terrence
Mann born nineteen fifty one. Highly accomplished actor of stage, screen,
in television. He's a three time Tony nominee who has
played major roles and in just an impressive array of
Broadway plays and musicals, including playing Frankenfurter at one point
in the two thousand's revival of The Rocky Horror Show

(43:37):
on Broadway.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
I bet he was great in that role.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, I just I saw some like kind of crappy
footage that was taken of him in the role, and
it looks great. And in seeing him in this, especially
in the rock Star get up, it's like you can tell,
it's like, oh, yeah, this guy was born to play Frankenfurter.
Not everybody is, but this guy certainly was. Now on
top of his his stage career his musical career on Broadway.

(44:02):
Many of you will also know him as the actor
playing the multiple elder clones of Emperor Cleon aka Brother
Dusk in the Apple series Foundation. He's incredible in that,
with Lee Pace playing the younger incarnations. So basically you
have a dynasty of clones in that show, and at

(44:22):
any given time, three of them are awake, a child,
a mature man, and then an aging man. So you
have brothers Don, Brother Day, and Brother Dusk, with the
central brother being the one in full command, with Brother
Dusk being kind of more in an advisor role and
also as a kind of a scribes role. But it's

(44:46):
amazing because even though they are all clones of this
original emperor, we see different variations in how they're presented,
and it'll carry over from say Lee Pace's performance in
one episode to Terrence Mann's performance of that same emperor
in the next episode after several decades have supposedly passed.

(45:09):
So anyway, I can't say enough nice things about Terrence Mann.
We can discuss to what extent he gets to flex
his acting muscles in this film, but his film and
TV credits include all four original Critter movies, the Netflix
series Since eight, the Dresden Files, and he's also in
Big Top Pee Wee. I believe he plays a clown.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
He has one of those screen presences that's just hypnotic,
like anytime he's on screen, you're looking at him, or
at least I was.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Now a quick note here when it comes to the crites,
the crites do speak in their own weird alien language.
I don't think they had a linguist to invent this,
but they do squawk to each other and we get
subtitle translations of what they say, and their voices are
provided by veteran or certainly now veteran voice actor Corey

(46:01):
Burton born nineteen fifty five. He's done so much work again,
can't even begin to mention everything he's worked on. But
I know him best from Star Wars the Clone Wars,
where he did a number of voices, including the voices
of Count Dooku and also the voice of Cad Baine,
who he also voices in the Book of Boba Fet.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
The crites have no word for thank you, but the
Chrit voices are good, despite the fact that you know,
it doesn't really sound like a language.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Yeah, it's just they're cartoon creatures. Now, the crits physically
were created by the Chioto Brothers Chioto brother Productions. These
are brothers Stephen Charles and Edward Chioto, best known for
their nineteen eighty eight film Killer Clowns from Outer Space.
That is their magnumums, which which is a lot of

(46:50):
fun and has some just terrific creature effects in it.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
You know, I think the Critters actually look pretty great.
I like the creature effects here.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
Yeah, they're puppety, but very good, very solid. They did
the effects on all four Critters movies. They also worked
on nineteen eighty eight's UHF, nineteen ninety one's Ernest Scared Stupid,
which I remember enjoying quite a bit in finding scarier
than I expected.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
I think this is a really common memory. I've talked
to other people about this, about this is a movie
that's supposed to be funny and for kids, but lots
of kids found it actually terrifying. The troll in it.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, and they're responsible for patrol effects there. They also
worked on two thousand and three's Elf. That's the actual
Elf movie, the one that you may watch for Christmas
this year. They also worked on two thousand and four's
Team America World Police, And there has long been talk
of a new Killer Clowns movie coming into being. I
don't know where that project currently stands. And then finally,

(47:51):
the score is by David Newman born nineteen fifty four,
prolific composer for film, mostly working on films that I
haven't seen or don't want to see, or have no
memory of the score from having seen, which again is
not necessarily a bad thing. As I've said before, a
film core, a film's score can be effective and kind
of invisible, especially when you're dealing with comedies and the like.

(48:13):
And it looks like he did a lot of comedies.
This was only his second score, following the nineteen eighty
four Tim Burton short Franken Weenie. And you know, some
of the feel good music and it is just a
little mushy, but I did really like the musical number
that they play over the end credits, some fun synthesize
they're working there, and then also some of the tensor moments.

(48:34):
Some of the action music is also pretty fun.

Speaker 3 (48:36):
I know that's your style and that stuff is good.
But I'd give him credit also and say that the
kind of like mushy sentimental feel good music is important
in establishing the feel good themes of this movie, Like
it really helps you feel like, ah, okay, we're home
on the farm now and everything's okay.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
Yeah, and clearly that was important to the film they
were trying to make. Yeah, absolutely no problem with it.
Like when this like very much rescuing a cat from
a mailbox music that kind of yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
Yeah, exactly. Okay, you want to talk about the plot.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Yeah, let's get into Critters one.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Here we begin in space, so there's stars twinkling in
the background, and then we see a giant, shadowy wad
of gray rock floating in the middle distance. A subtitle
tells us that this is prison Asteroid Sector seventeen, maximum Security.
Then we get some like space space traffic control on

(49:43):
the radio channels, there's there's chatter, voices are speaking in English.
By the way, we don't have to deal with subtitles
for this. They say radar control. This is Prison Transport
nine ninety sixty one, requesting permission to land, and the
prison transport ship explains the it has a cargo of
eight krite prisoners. Krits is what the aliens are called

(50:06):
in this movie. You might think that they're called critters,
but actually that just comes from a kid calling them
critters later in the film when he doesn't know that
they're called krits. I haven't dug into the origins of
this movie to figure out where the word krite comes from,
like why they picked that. If it has something to
do with cr Tyrian, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
That would be great criterion collect crite Heian collection, Yes.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
Whatever a crit is. The space traffic controller says, they've
been expecting the ship for a while, but weren't you
supposed to have ten crites rather than eight? And oh yeah,
the pilot confirms they originally had ten, but they've had
such problems. The crits are eating everything on the ship.
Two of them were killed along the way, or they
wouldn't have had enough food to make the journey. So
these are eating machines whatever they are.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yeah, I have questions about the ethics of this prison system,
but clearly crites are bad news.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
So now we're inside the prison facility and we see
a humanoid alien sort of zipping around on a personal hovercraft.
The alien is wearing insulated armor with hoses snaking around
connected to various nozzles. It has a big head like
Exeter in this Island Earth, with like scalp flaps connecting
its shoulders to its head like a skin hood. The

(51:22):
skin is sort of pale blue gray, and this guy
is called Zante.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
I love how this movie, much like Terra Vision, just
kicks off with this unreal, slightly hammy, but well crafted
science fiction alien scenario from which we are then going
to remove ourselves to re enter a human world.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
Yeah, like, nothing else will take place here after the prologue.
We're just like seeing this world and then we're going
to spend the rest of the movie on Earth. And
I kind of like that dynamic. So something goes wrong
with the prisoner transfer. People on the radio are calling
for backup and they say the crist are up to something,
and then there are explosions coming from somewhere, And yeah,

(52:04):
I like the little view we get of this like
multicultural alien facility. There are obviously multiple different kinds of
sentient aliens working here. It's not just like one species
from one planet, and we don't get a great look
at most of them. We see just flashes of, like
some interesting silhouettes and the shadows and the smoke. And

(52:25):
I like stuff like this. I like intriguing little glimpses
of an unfamiliar world without too much detail.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, yeah, just a hint of the interplanetary world from
which the crites are.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
Arriving anyway, word comes down to the alien control room
that the crites have hijacked a ship and escaped. Oh no,
And we see close ups of tiny, slimy clawed hands
operating levers and pushing buttons in a sci fi cockpit,
and we don't see what the creatures look like in
full yet. The stolen spaceship blasts its way out of

(53:00):
and then soars off into the void and then back
on the prison asteroid. The operator announces their next move.
They call the Alien Bounty Hunters, and here we are
treated to a suiting up bontage. And this raised a
question for me, where does the visual meme of the
suiting up montage come from? I mainly associated with Batman movies,

(53:23):
starting with Tim Burton's Batman in nineteen eighty nine, but
it's in basically all of them. Rob I've got a
link actually to a YouTube video I found that's just
a compilation of all the Batman suiting up montages. So
the way it usually works is you get extreme close
ups of buckles, fastening buttons, snapping, gloves sliding onto hands,

(53:43):
gear sliding into holsters in the case of Batman, sometimes
you just get like the bat symbol or just like
butt cheeks flexing in batpants, so you see all of
the elements of the outfit being donned and locked into
place before you see the character in full costume. And
in the case of Critters, we get the same thing.

(54:03):
With the Bounty Hunters. They have these like kind of
weird brown and black studded leather costumes, a little bit
sci fi, a little bit conan, the barbarian, a little
bit just leather, and we see the buttons snapping, the
belts and straps, pulling tight knife going into a sheath,
et cetera. But Critters actually came out before the eighty

(54:25):
nine Burton Batman, so obviously it didn't get it from there.
I assume this must be something that was in movies
or TV shows already, But where does it come from?

Speaker 2 (54:35):
I don't have an answer. I would like to explore
explore this topic more because I would guess it probably
does have something to do with leather and a kind
of fetishization of leather. It probably has something to do
with biker movies and or like full body leather catsuits.
I can't help but wonder if we might find an

(54:56):
answer and say nineteen sixty eight's The Girl on a
Motorcycle starring Maryann Faith or or something of that nature.
You know, something to wear. Like, clearly the leather costume
is key somehow to the vision for the picture, and
we're gonna have a filmmaker that's insightful enough to add
all those small details leading up to the whole.

Speaker 3 (55:14):
Yeah, so you see all the buckles and the clasps
and everything before you see the outfit.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Yeah, but I don't know. I this is a mystery
to me. I haven't haven't looked into it yet.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
Though I will say the suit up montage here has
a nice twist because usually I'm used to seeing Batman
after this montage is done. But here, when the Bounty
Hunters are finally shown in full, they're standing side by
side in the dark corridor and they are faceless. Their
heads are just smooth, featureless, pale green orbs good design choice.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
I like it, Yeah, I think the overall I'm instantly
in love with this cotton concept because, yeah, the green,
featureless faces this, you know, this has a lot of
alien mystery to it. And then their costumes are very
like Bounty huntry in the sort of Star Wars since
the words because they have they kind of have some

(56:07):
very worn and kind of rough looking elements, you know,
like they're kind of some of the fabric looks looks
very worn out. But then also like the loll the
leather stuff looks like it's very utilitarian, like these are
guys or something that are used to getting stuff done.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
It's not the clean, new, freshly pressed look of Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
Here.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
Space looks lived in more like Star Wars. Everything's kind
of messy and worn out.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
Yeah, and they're kind of like space bikers to a
certain extent too. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:38):
Well, anyway, these creatures are now on the case. A
Zanti here charges them with tracking down the crits and
destroying them before they can feed, and he offers them
full payment when the job is completed. So now we
cut to Earth. Here we get farmland, golden wheat fields,
a windmill, a wooden rail fence, an axe wedged in

(56:58):
a chopping block, except why is it a fire axe?
It's got that like the Pulaski back. I don't know,
but nice homie music letting you know that it's just
a sleepy little village vibe. Everything is a Okay, no
flesh gobbling aliens, no bounty hunters roaming around this place.
Is doing fine. Inside the house, d Wallace is making breakfast.

(57:20):
She's like sizzling bacon and a cast iron pan. There
is a bottle of vegetable oil next to the pan.
And I don't know if this is what it's implying,
but folks, you do not need to add oil to
the pan when you're making bacon. Bacon will render its
own fat.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
Maybe it's vegetarian bacon.

Speaker 5 (57:36):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Oh maybe, Okay, no, it's it's it's bacon.

Speaker 3 (57:42):
So we meet the Brown family here. The mom is Helen.
That's d Wallace. She is kind, loving and self sacrificing.
She works hard to take care of her family. You
see that she doesn't have a lot of time for herself.
Like there's one moment and you know she's like constantly
trying to do things for the family and the kid
and they're barely noticing. And then there's one scene where

(58:03):
she tries to sit down and read a book but
is interrupted by the alien invasion. Though she shows herself
to be ferocious later on in the film in beating
Chrits with the butt of a shotgun. There are like
multiple scenes where the aliens are coming at the family
and she's just whacking them with a gun held backwards.

Speaker 5 (58:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
So they initially present a very again kind of like
fifties and sixties era TV mom, but then they're able
to twist that a little bit and show that, yeah,
she can also get in there and kill some crits.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
Okay, we got the dad Jay. On one hand, he's
just like a real down home, like chicken fried steak
of a man. You know, his mother was a tractor,
his father was a cow chip, and he wears overalls.
And on the other hand, though, he's in some kind
of Ghostbusters themed bowling team.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Yeah. Yeah, it took me a while to figure that out.
I was like, what is Dad's off brand Ghostbuster where about?
And then I realized, Oh, it's a it's a bowling pin.
This is the mascot for this bowling team, because we
do see it a lot. Yeah, he's a fun character,
like he has very seems very checked out. Like at
one point in the film, when April the daughter's about
to go on her date there with billy' zayan, he's like,

(59:20):
have you had the talk with our daughter, and she's like, yes,
of course, I've had the talk with our like clearly
twenty five year old daughter at this point, it was
years ago, and he's like years ago. Oh. He's also
constantly drinking out of mason jars for some reason. Oh yeah,
like I think he gets served coffee in a mason jar.

(59:42):
Everyone else is drinking out of glass, normal glassware. He's
drinking his coffee out of a mason jar and stirring,
if not honey, then possibly jam into it.

Speaker 3 (59:52):
It looked like honey. Yes, he was adding honey to
his coffee.

Speaker 4 (59:55):
Where it's like, okay, dad, whatever, whatever you need. I
guess I don't know why that seems so weird. People
add honey to their tea, but for some reason, I
don't think about that with coffee. Maybe because coffee is
already acidic and honey is also acidic.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
I've never added honey to a coffee. I mean, it
may be some people's thing. If it's your thing, right in,
let us know why you made this choice of life.
All right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
Now on to the kids you mentioned. April the daughter,
she's your classic country girl yearning for a no good
city boy with vanity plates on his car, uncreative ones,
Billy's Aine's vanity plates. Say what do they say? Too great?
G R eight? Come on, Billy's saying that is that's
not very good. You're trying to think of it while

(01:00:38):
you were standing in line.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Yeah, and plus it's just it's too prideful. You're gonna
get eaten by space aliens with that fanity plate.

Speaker 3 (01:00:45):
April has low tolerance for the geeky antics of her
little brother, and she lashes out at him in spite.
The little brother with the geeky antics is Brad, the
son of the family. He likes to hog the bathroom
when his sister needs it. He likes to play hooky,
skip school, and manufacture his own firecrackers. But like I said,
he has gumption.

Speaker 5 (01:01:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
So we get to meet the family over breakfast, get
to know them, see the tensions between brother and sister.
They're they're like tattling on each other about things and
running off to school. I don't think we ever see
them at school, We just see them later back at home.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
Now in the notes here, you point out that they
have a chimex. That's how they're making their coffee.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
Also alarmed me because I didn't even know they had
them back then. I didn't. I wasn't exposed to them
untill I was in my early thirties or something where
I was like, Wow, a bold new way to make coffee.
But it's not so bold or so new.

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
I love pour over coffee and we use a chemex
here at home. And yeah, they've been around for a while.
They were famous. They were like a famous product design
in mid the mid century. I think they're from the
forties or the fifties. Originally, there's some kind of thing
about like the Kimmicks caraffe being like featured in the
the I don't know, Museum of Modern Art or something.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Yeah, oh that's interesting. Yeah, I don't know much about it.
But so would you find it out of keeping with
the character of the family as otherwise presented here that
they have a chemex or do you find it acceptable?

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
I don't know if it's out of keeping or not.
I don't know who normally would use a Kimx at
this time, but I just was like, hey, I've got
one of those that's in their kitchen, looks just like ours.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
I tend to think of it as the coffee maker
that coffee shops and sometimes individuals will have on a
shelf and if you were to ask about it, they'd
be like, oh, it's just for show. Nobody uses that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:36):
Well, it does look nice, but no, it makes.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
It because it's a beautiful, beautiful vessel, that's sure. That's
for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
I think the main thing is is like a simple design.
And then it's got these filters, sort of rectangular filters
that are a thick kind of paper that is supposed
to I guess because of the thickness or something is
supposed to make coffee that is like less bitter or
I don't know, has like a cleaner taste. I don't
know if that's really true. I'm not a coffee geek
and I haven't ab tested all this, but yeah, we

(01:03:04):
like the coffee we make in our chimacks.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
They didn't pay us for that. Oh maybe we should
try to get them as a sponsor. We can as
seen in Critters, as seen exactly. Yeah, okay. So also
we're gonna check in with some more characters at town
police headquarters. So we get Harve, the police chief. That's
Mment Walsh. He's somehow greasy and creaky at the same time.

(01:03:27):
If this metaphor makes sense. It's like he needs a
spray of WD forty, but he got a squirt of
chicken fat instead, and now the hinges are squealing louder
than ever. He is the dyspeptic arm of the law.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
That's some inimit Walsh magic right there. It's like the
that's the perfect formula.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
We've also got Sally, his assistant. She's a bit aloof
from the here and now because her head is wrapped
up in stories she's reading in the tabloids featuring the
top headline mister Spock is the father of my baby.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
Yeah, she's somewhat checked out.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
You also got Charlie mcfatten. This is the otis of
the story again. He's the town drunk. He's also an
auto mechanic. I think Jay earlier is like working on
a car in the basement of the house. I guess
they've got like a garage underneath their house. And Jay
was like, where's Charlie? So he was supposed to be
there helping him, but he didn't show up. Charlie says

(01:04:23):
he used to have a promising baseball career ahead of him,
but then he started receiving messages from aliens in the
fillings in his teeth, and this interfered with his baseball prospects,
and now his prospects are Rye whiskey and a jail
cell every night. Now, let's check in with the Bounty Hunters.
Their crews in the galaxy in their ship when they
get a holograph message from their boss, Zanti. Zanti says

(01:04:47):
they have tracked the crits to a solar system with
only one planet that supports life. It is called Earth.
They should be able to use their shape shifting abilities
to blend in when they arrive at Earth. Earth, and
he's sending a data tape with information about the planet
and its civilizations. And he also starts telling them not

(01:05:07):
to destroy everything in sight once they get there, but
they like hang up on him in the middle of
this exhortation.

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):
Yeah, as we'll see, they have a very rough hand
when it comes to critter elimination.

Speaker 3 (01:05:18):
Yeah, So they roll the tape containing what aliens know
about Earth. It literally says Earth is a culture of
many contrasts, like did the Simpsons get it from there?

Speaker 5 (01:05:29):
Maybe?

Speaker 3 (01:05:30):
But they sort of do that the David Bowie thing
from the Man who Fell to Earth. They're watching a
bunch of random different TV footage spliced together at superspeed.
There's like, I don't know, I was just trying to
pause it and see what are these things. There's like
a dude in a lab coat talking at the camera
with a bunch of beakers. There are car crashes, the
hydrogen bomb, Robin Hood, I think a Robin Hood movie,

(01:05:53):
aerobics routines from the nineteen twenties. But then finally it
lands on a music video. It's rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Oh. I think we also saw just a glimpse of
Klaskinski from Android in there as well.

Speaker 3 (01:06:06):
Did we.

Speaker 5 (01:06:06):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
I think so.

Speaker 3 (01:06:08):
Yeah, the director's own films. That's part of the training.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
But you mentioned the rock and roll, and that's key.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
Yeah. So once they get to the rock and roll,
they slow it down to normal speed because this is educational.
The artist is called Johnny Steele and the song is
called the Power of the Night. We will hear it
many times in the film. You get like, I don't
know how many minutes of audio time for the Power
of the Night, but it's clearly a favorite of the

(01:06:34):
Earthlings at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
Yeah, yeah, rocking.

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
The Bounty hunters are digging the music, as Johnny Alucard
would say, another Johnny, I've just I've wrote down some
of the lyrics. Here's one night Times on Fire. We
are the heat, the flame is desire burns in the seat.
But the Bounty Hunters are like, now that's what I

(01:06:58):
call music, and one of them feeling the power of
the night so hard that his face melts, or I
guess I should say his non face melts, like the
green orb melts away, it dissolves, and then it is
replaced by what is this. It's a human skull with
flesh and blood slowly building up around it through a
pretty cool reverse melting effect. There are multiple parts of

(01:07:20):
this movie that use reverse footage effects. There's one part
later where like a blown up house is reassembled through
a reverse footage here, but this is obviously reverse footage
to put a mask onto a face. I guess they
filmed it maybe melting away, and then reversed it. But
by the time it's done, the bounty Hunter is Johnny

(01:07:41):
Steele from the music video. Looks exactly like him.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Great effects sequence and also just solid choice with the
shape shifting aliens choosing a rock star to be their
avatar on Earth or one of them does, the other
one hasn't made up their mind yet and just can't
find something that suits them.

Speaker 3 (01:07:57):
So back on the Brown family farm, Brad and Charlie
are playing with firecrackers while Charlie is supposed to be working.
Charlie is supposed to be helping Jay fix his truck,
but instead Charlie is hanging out with the kid doing firecrackers,
I think, repairing his slingshot. And then April brings home
her new boyfriend, and by god, it's Billy Zane. The

(01:08:20):
character is named Steve Elliott. They pull up in a
car that is a city car, and unfortunately Steve is
a city boy and that does not fly around here.
Jay comes and investigates billy Zane's car and he observes
that one would not be able to hold much hay
in it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
I like Billy Zane's reaction to that line. It's just
like a little glimpse of like the natural charisma and
an ultimate acting ability of Billy Zaye. You just see
a little peak of it here, but you can see
why he went on other things.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
He's like, yeah, I can't hold much hay in this,
and Billy Zaye's like yep. But there's an unfortunate slingshot
incident in the scene. So Charlie is trying to demonstrate
that he has fixed brad slingshot, and he shoots a
pebble at like a coke can up on a fence post,
but misses and hits April in the butt, and then

(01:09:12):
she turns around angry, but she assumes it was Brad
who did the sling shotting, and Brad heroically takes the
blame even though it was Charlie. He doesn't want Charlie
to get in trouble and loses his mechanic job with
his dad, so he's like, yeah, okay, I did it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
He's noble, he's a good kid.

Speaker 3 (01:09:28):
Yeah, and he's sent to bed without supper. So we
follow Brad to his bedroom where I was looking at
the posters. He has posters for Bruce Springsteen, the police
as in the band Stinging the Police, not the Police,
tree leaves and ferns, the United States map, and he's
listening to a cassette tape of Power of the Night.

(01:09:50):
So he is a Johnny Steel fan.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
I think we've discussed this before on the show. I
Love a Good Kids room represented in a movie. I
love to look at all the details and see the
what degree they pulled it off and made it believable,
to what extent they're acknowledging actual franchises that a child
in this time period would have been into, And I
feel like they nailed it pretty well. I've seen plenty
of especially more recent films, where I'm like, oh, you

(01:10:14):
just you printed out some stock art. Those are not
real movies, those are not real comic book characters. Not
buying it. But this one does a good job.

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):
I agree for the most part, except I don't know.
I could be wrong about this, but I'm like, were
they that many like twelve year olds who really liked
the police?

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
I don't know. Yeah, okay, I don't know why the
police here. It would have been, but you know, he doesn't.

Speaker 3 (01:10:39):
Johnny Steele makes more sense.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
Johnny Steele makes sense, and maybe he, you know, a
different kid would have been more into metal, But I
don't really buy that Brad would be. It would have
been a metal head, so maybe. I mean, there's all
sorts of weird realistically, when you look back in the
bands you get into when you start getting too music,
sometimes there are weird fits, you know, like that's true. Yeah,
look for examples from your own musical paths listeners. I'm

(01:11:04):
sure you can think of some good ones.

Speaker 3 (01:11:06):
I'm just trying to imagine, like Brad sitting there in
his bedroom making firecrackers, listening to Walking on the Moon.

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
Yeah, yeah, rock Sanne Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:11:17):
Well, anyway, while he's in his bedroom being sent to
bed without supper as punishment, April and Billy's ay and
are having dinner with their parents, including corn on the cob.
And oh man, you go home to meet your boyfriend
or girlfriend's parents and they have corn on the cob,
it just seems like it's recipe for disaster. How do
you not get it in your teeth? How do you
keep your dignity?

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
Yeah, I mean maybe that's intentional. It's like there's no
way they'll be making out later if we serve corn
in the cop But but like we said earlier, this
this meal actually goes pretty well, and I feel like
the boyfriend is respectful. And also we should note at
this point in the film, everyone is still marked safe
from critter attacks. We have not had any fatalities. I'm

(01:12:02):
Planet Earth due to critters.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):
That's right. So but eventually April and Billy z Ain.
They leave to go for a ride, I think, but
April is actually just taking Billy's Ain in to the
barn to make out with him, and he's clearly like
freaked out. He's like, I don't know if this is
such a good idea of it. She's like, ah, come on,
my parents will never think to look in the barn. Meanwhile,

(01:12:25):
Brad sneaks out through his bedroom window and while climbing
on the roof, witnesses the arrival of an alien spaceship.
It flies over the farm, causes a mighty rumble, and
Jay sees it too. He catches Brad sneaking out, so
you think Brad's going to be in a lot of trouble.
But then there's a kind of I don't know, there's
the thing I liked here. It's kind of sweet, where
like the dad catches Brad doing what he's not supposed

(01:12:47):
to do, but he's but instead they're like, okay, well
let's go investigate see what this is. It's kind of sweet.
Oh but what they find is not so sweet. They
find a mutilated cow. So we're back in cattle mutilation territory.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
This is I didn't I don't remember if this came
up when we talked about The Return, which is definitely
a cattle mutilation movie. So yeah, clearly they're dipping into
cattle mutilation panic a bit here.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
They say what could have done this? Well, it was Chrits,
of course, But we don't see the crits until I
think the first time we see them is when Jay
the dad has to go down in the basement.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Or wait, is the deputy killed first?

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
Oh? Maybe? So the police deputy is driving around, something
goes out in front of him in the road, He swerves,
and then he is He gets out of his car
and is attacked by Krits. We don't see them, but
there's some kind of furry creature that pulls him underneath
the car and gobbles him up.

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
Yeah, but then comes the basement attack scene.

Speaker 3 (01:13:48):
Right, Yeah, So the phones and the power are out
and Jay thinks he has to go back to go
into the basement to flip the breaker. But when he
goes down there, what is that? There's something moving on
the shelf, pulsing in the dark. What could it be?
He goes to investigate and it is this strange furry
hedgehog like creature that these creatures start jumping out biting him,

(01:14:12):
and it becomes an actually quite visceral, bloody attack. They
like shoot at him with these quills and when this,
I guess the elements of a cried attack involve biting
with razor sharp teeth, which draws a lot of blood.
There are the poison quills, which when they hit you
render you unconscious, though typically when they're pulled out people

(01:14:33):
wake up immediately. And then there's also the the crites
can move quickly by turning into a tumbleweed and rolling,
or like Sonic the Hedgehog.

Speaker 2 (01:14:42):
Yeah, they're kind of like a cross between Sonic the
Hedgehog and a mythic version of a porcupine, you know,
like the sort of myth that a porcupine can fire
it's quills at you. Well, chrites certainly do. And yeah,
there's a lot of blood here. I had not. I'm
not sure if I ever saw critters one. I think
ma I saw critters too back in the day. But

(01:15:04):
either way, not remembering what happens here, I thought Dad
was done for. I thought, like this, he's lost too
much blood, he's got too many krites on him, He's
done for.

Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
It really did seem that way. There's a lot of peril,
but Dad is rescued. D Wallace and Brad are able
to grab him and pull him up the staircase out
of the cellar and get him to safety. And yeah,
like you were saying, there's a lot of blood, there
is a lot of blood, just generally in this movie,
for PG. Thirteen especially, but the blood is often poorly lit.

(01:15:33):
So in some of the most violent scenes, it'll be
in like a dark room and the blood appears as
just like dark wet patches on the clothing rather than
like bright red and running.

Speaker 2 (01:15:44):
Yeah, and we don't really get a lot of what
I would say like gory human kills. Yeah, most of
the gory kills we get really are are krites getting blasted,
though sometimes in a very comedic fashion, which we'll get
to right.

Speaker 3 (01:15:58):
And we do get another tragic human death. So you know,
nobody really cared about this, uh, this police deputy who
got eaten. But but now they're going to do it
to Billy Zay and I can't believe it. So Crits
attack April and Billy Zaine in the barn while they're
making out, and they like bite Billy Zane in the
stomach and start chomping on his guts. And at this
point I was just I was so torn up about it.

(01:16:18):
How could they?

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
I think this is this is the scene where he
reaches for the radio and they bite his fingers off
and yeah, yeah, so that's right. Yeah, it's a rough
death for this actually, like seemingly likable young man who
made the mistake of going to the country.

Speaker 3 (01:16:33):
He should not have should have stayed in the city.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
Don't listen to Neil Young. Wait, what do you.

Speaker 3 (01:16:41):
Mean, Oh, are you ready for the country?

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):
Yeah he was not.

Speaker 3 (01:16:44):
No, it seems like a warning. Actually, I think I
think he should have listened.

Speaker 2 (01:16:49):
Yeah, that's about christs. I think Neil Young is singing like,
are you ready for the country because they've got some crimes.

Speaker 6 (01:16:57):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:16:57):
But Brad comes in and he saves the day by
convincing a Kright to eat one of his firecrackers, and
then it like blows up inside the Kright and you
think the Cright's gonna like just like explode with chunks
going everywhere, but instead there is a comedic like it's
sort of its belly pooches out and then it just
like keels over.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Smoke out of the mouth basically like a cartoon coyote
ate a hot chili pepper kind of yes, so solid.

Speaker 3 (01:17:28):
So there are a bunch more sort of just krite
battling set pieces that I'm not going to recount in detail.
The whole way there are battles is the family tries
to make it back to the house. They battle krites
along the way. There's one part where krights are chasing them,
but then they managed to get behind There's like a
waist high picket fence that the crits get stuck behind.
There's just banging on the picket fence. Then there are

(01:17:52):
also battles inside the house. The family gets in there
and the crates attack them. They fight them in various ways,
and yes, there is a scene with a with a
critter in the toilet. So that's a milestone achieved.

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
Absolutely. Yeah. They really seem to just spare no part
of this house. They're like, have we had a crate
attack in the gift drafting room? No, well let's do it.
Let's do it. We have to cover every room in
this house.

Speaker 3 (01:18:17):
There's also just random scenes of the bounty hunters, you know,
roaming around and going to various places. They go to
church and they like accidentally back their car. They steal
a police car. Once they arrive. It's the deputies backwards,
yeah yeah, and they drive it backwards because they don't
know they're not from Earth. They don't know how you're
supposed to drive, so they're driving it in reverse everywhere,

(01:18:39):
and they like back it through the I don't know
what you call it, like the porch of a church
while church is in session and the reverend is talking
about Sodom and Gomorrah. And then they go into the
church and the and one of the bounty hunter that
had not transformed into Johnny Steel turns into the reverend
from the church.

Speaker 2 (01:18:59):
Yeah, he'd previously taken on the form of the dead deputy,
so he looked like a zombie previously. This is the
non Johnny Steele, the non ug bounty hunter who can't
make up his mind, who keeps choosing a new form.

Speaker 3 (01:19:15):
Then they go to the bowling Alley and the reverend
one transforms into looking like Charlie, the guy who thinks
he's been talking to aliens the whole time. And then
eventually they're driving around later and they're gonna make it
to the house. So inside the house. Brad, he becomes
heroic the son, and he's like he ventures out. He says,
I'm gonna go get help. So he goes out and

(01:19:36):
he flags down a police car after being chased by
crits of course for a while, and it is being
driven by the Bounty Hunters. So this is the scene
where we get the use of the word critters. Brad,
not knowing that these are christs, says, hey, there are
critters attacking my family. You've got to come help, And
the Bounty Hunters do go to investigate, though they're very
they're not very communicative. They just sort of like stare

(01:19:59):
at people most of the time.

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
Yeah, they do a lot of terminatory sort of behaviors,
but generally for comedic effects. I love the scene in
the bowling alley. The ug character like palms a bowling
ball and then he looks down at the pins and
just hurls it straight at the pins and shatters them.

Speaker 3 (01:20:17):
It's like he wanted he wanted everyone there to know
that he could beat them all at bowling. Yeah, that's
just part of his strategy for finding out where the
crits are.

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
Yeah, it's it this. I think it's a it's a
specific example of a thing this film does really well,
Like it's clearly drawing on these various obvious mainstream sci
fi influences, but manages to figure out a way to
reweave them into something that feels unique and new.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
Yeah. So the bounty hunters arrive at the house on
the Brown family farm and they start scouring it for Chrits.
They like blow up one of the Krits in a
toilet with with their like laser blasters. Meanwhile, Emmett wallsh
arrives and is generally not very helpful. He's like shooting
at rolling fur balls and missing and then he gets
thrown out a window.

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
Is this the part maybe getting ahead of us, But
there's a great scene where we get some subtitles for
the Crits. Yes, and they're like, they have weapons, and
then the other one says the F word.

Speaker 3 (01:21:18):
It's and I laughed, well, I think one of them
says they have weapons and the other one says, so what,
And then the one that said the head weapons gets
blasted by the and then the other one just says
the F word.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
It's it's tremendous, but says the F word and it's
in the crit language. And then the subtitles tell us
what he's saying. So I thought that was legitimately funny.

Speaker 3 (01:21:41):
Now somewhere along here, one of the crites becomes enormous,
like it grows up and becomes bear sized, and like
Brad sees it grow by watching its shadow in the
light of the moon while he's running to get help
and then coming to the final showdown, April, the sister
is knocked unconscious with the poison quill and kidnapped by
the big crit Megacrite is like dragging her back to

(01:22:02):
the spaceship, I guess, for I don't know. Inflight, Snack
probably and the remaining handful of Krites are getting ready
to escape. They're like getting the ship, you know, pulling
up the landing gear and all that. So in the end,
Brad has to save his sister, even though they've been
fighting the whole time, along with the help of Charlie
the mechanic. So Brad infiltrates the alien ship, pulls April out,

(01:22:25):
and then throws his giant homemade firecracker inside the spaceship.
And then Charlie also helps by igniting the fuse of
the firecracker by throwing a Molotov cocktail inside the closing
door of the spaceship, and then the Krits, out of
just pure spite as they're flying away, shoot a laser
beam and blow up the family's house. But then of

(01:22:49):
course the fuse on the firecracker burns through and their
ship explodes. So finally the Crites are defeated, not just
by the bounty hunters but by Brad and Charlie. So earthlings,
you know, unassuming earthlings to the rescue, and I guess
because Brad has proved his worthiness, the alien bounty hunters

(01:23:10):
leave him with a sort of communicator device. It's like
a little radio contact thing. And then upon their departure
they somehow use the magic power of their ship to
reverse footage reassemble the family's house after we saw it
like nearly adamized, just blown to toothpicks.

Speaker 2 (01:23:31):
Yeah, they have the technology to do this, and yet
to kill a cry they have to manually hunt it
down and shoot it with some sort of a space shotgun.
Maybe that's just how it is. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:23:41):
But so now the family has their house back. All
members of the family are safe. Of course, Billy Zain
is no longer with us, but the family is all
all right, and that seems to go with like the
feel good vibes. At the end of the movie, everybody
in the family's okay. But we do get a final stinger,
which is the camera sort of like Alli's into the
chicken coop and we see these leathery looking studded black

(01:24:05):
eggs in there, and they're in the chicken coop, which
I started laughing at because I was like, does this
mean the family's gonna like just use them like eggs,
like make an omelet?

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
I would hope not. That would prevent the sequel from
taking place, I assume.

Speaker 3 (01:24:20):
So upon reflection, I noticed what I thought was a
kind of interesting theme in this film. I didn't notice
while I was watching, but thinking back on it, there
are many acts of spite in the movie, Like there
are multiple times when someone just sort of casually does
injury to some other party as they are leaving a scene,
like the brother and sister do it to each other

(01:24:42):
early on, the crits do it to the farm while escaping.
They're getting out there, leaving this planet, but they're just like,
the heck with you, They just blow up the house.
And I don't know what to make of that. But
it's there in the subtext, though in all cases the
wounds caused by spite are healed at the end of
the film.

Speaker 2 (01:25:00):
Yeah, they're just spiteful little creatures. They're hungry and they're hateful,
and you never want them to show up on your planet,
but if you do, you need to take care of
them quickly. And they everyone managed to pull this off,
or so it would seem.

Speaker 3 (01:25:14):
Another thing that I think is interesting. We sort of
talked about this earlier, but it's a misimpression I had
about them, which is I thought of the crites before
I watched this movie as just animalistic eating machines, but
that's not what they are. They have synians like they
talk to each other in their different language subtitled they
work machines, they fly spaceships. Does this make them different

(01:25:36):
from most other movie monsters? I was thinking that actually,
most of the creatures in the various Gromlins movies are
able to like work machines and communicate and coordinate with
one another, whether verbally or nonverbally. That's sort of part
of the Gromlin thing, that they're not just mindless, roaring,
you know, chompers, but they have intention behind their behavior,

(01:26:00):
you're usually malevolent intention, even if that intention is rather
just sort of like crude impulses. Like they they have
plans and they enact them. Does this inform something about
the appeal of the Gromlin subgenre.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):
Yeah, that they're schemers, that they're you know what, they
lack in size and perhaps even in like pure visual threat,
because generally speaking, they're not the size of bears. But
they have they have plans, they have schemes. They're tricky,
they're they're little, They're little devils. They're little demons working
their mischief in the.

Speaker 3 (01:26:36):
World, getting into the chicken coop, knocking over the fence,
eating your billy's and boyfriend. Yeah, causing all kinds of mischief. Well,
I think that's all I've got to say about critters.
But I enjoyed this one.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
Yeah, it's a I think it's a very enjoyable film
that holds up really well. So if you haven't seen
it and you're looking for just a pretty pretty harmless
but fun and at times funny creature feature, I don't
think you can go wrong with Gromlins. I'm sorry, I
don't think you can go wrong. You can go wrong
with Gromlins in general. I don't think you can go
wrong with Critters one though, fun movie. All right, we'll

(01:27:14):
go ahead and close it there, but we'd love to
hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on
Critters or the Critters franchise, Gromlins movies in general, wright
in we would love to hear from you. Just a
reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a
science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Fridays,
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. And if you
want to see a complete list all of those movies

(01:27:35):
that we've talked about in Weird House Cinema, you can
go to letterbox dot com. That's L E T T
E R B O x D dot com. You'll find
us on there as Weird House, and yeah, there'll be
a list of all the movies we've covered. Also, if
you're on Instagram, go to STBYM podcast that's Stuff to
Blow Your Mind's account and our social media team has
been putting up little video features for these episodes that

(01:27:58):
have some of the trailer footage. So we always feature
the trailer audio if we can find it for the
movies we talk about here, but it's also nice to
check in on the visuals as well.

Speaker 3 (01:28:08):
Oh yes, huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:28:30):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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