One B-Movie Accidentally Became One Of The Best Gremlins Copycats

If you has asked any of the main creative forces behind Critters if their film was inspired by the recent success of Joe Dante’s Gremlins, you would get in response an emphatic “no.” “It was certainly not something we were thinking about very much at the time, if at all,” said Rupert Harvey in an interview with Den of Geek.

Despite the fact that both films were horror-comedies about nasty, demonic, pint-sized critters who leave a trail of mayhem and murder in a small town, and Gremlins had cleaned up at the box office just two years before Critters’ premiere, the original screenplay for Critters was written by Domonic Muir a year before Gremlins went into production. “People who say there are similarities are just influenced by the fact Gremlins was such a huge success, but it was a much bigger budget movie,” Harvey clarified in the same interview.

In defense of some of the film's accusers, Critters is clearly a low-budget blend of several sci-fi and pulp archetypes that had recently proven their worth at the box office. In a complimentary review, Roger Ebert branded it “a truly ambitious ripoff” of Gremlins, E.T., Starman, and The Terminator, pointing out that in both E.T. and Critters, Dee Wallace Stone played a stressed mother to children who assume the responsibility of dealing with the alien arrival. But one reason why the Critters team have always maintained their integrity and originality is, in the years that followed its 1986 release, many cheap and lame Gremlins copycats would spawn, and Critters is the only film that passes as imaginative and well-made. Nobody wants to be grouped in with Munchies, Hobgoblins, Elves, Beasties, and Goobers. (Ghoulies and The Gate both get a partial pass; Ghoulies because the first film in the series predates Critters; The Gate because it is legitimately good.)

While distributor New Line Cinema definitely bankrolled Critters off the back of the newly established Gremlins market, Critters has a lot of uniqueness in the “nasty little monster” B-movie canon. The critters, or “Krites,” are alien criminals. On the surface, they look like mischievous, if dishevelled varmints, but they are surprisingly intelligent, scheming, and able to grow four feet tall if they have a fresh supply of fleshy good — including a baby-faced Billy Zane.

We meet them escaping from an asteroid prison, inbound for Earth in a spaceship and pursued by shape-shifting bounty hunters. These extra-terrestrial mercenaries can take the form of any human they want. —as demonstrated by a deliciously squelchy flesh-growth special effect — but while one of them decides to take the form of a famous fictional rock star (Terrence Mann), the other is more indecisive and switches between multiple townspeople throughout the film, much to the confusion of the locals. After they land, the Krites are mostly a nuisance to the Brown family, who live in a modest farmhouse in rural Kansas. Both Gremlins and Critters take place in a small town, but Critters moves the micro-creature chaos from a fake town in Pennsylvania to a fake town in Kansas, and pushing the action further west contributes to Critters’ distinct tone over Gremlins.

Instead of Joe Dante’s pastiche of Frank Capra-esque small town Americana, the isolated, western-style town of Critters is more isolated and suspicious of outsiders — the personalities are less fussy and more eccentric, the town drunkard is loopier, and there’s a real sense of danger coming from the stretches of frontier darkness surrounding the Brown’s homestead. Asides from these western touches, the horror in Critters feels more sincere than it is in Gremlins, with the Krites lurking in dark corners, firing poison quills, and revealing rows of sharp teeth to feast on animals and teen boyfriends. It has the same absurd, giddy sense of danger as Gremlins, but with far less cackling and overt parody — although the subtitled Krite dialogue gets a laugh every time.

Regardless of its reportedly original development, the comic anarchy of the film’s titular scurrying menaces is what weds Critters to Gremlins, but it's more of a cousin than an unworthy rip-off. The simple story of invaders sieging a Kansas homestead is boosted not just by its blend of horror and comedy, but by other specific genre inflections — namely westerns and sci-fi — that single Critters out as a plucky, playful lil monster B-movie with a lot of tricks up its sleeve. Even though Critters is fated to be remembered as a Gremlin copycat, it has the honor of being the only one that can stand on in its own two stumpy feet.

Critters is streaming on Tubi.