Gremlins

Cute. Clever. Mischievous. Intelligent. WE'RE HERE! Sure, he's cute. Of course you can keep him. But heed these three warnings: Don't ever got him wet. Keep him away from bright light. And the most important thing, the one thing you must never forget: no matter how much he cries, no matter how much he begs... never, never feed him after midnight. With these mysterious instructions, young Billy Peltzer takes possession of his cuddly new pet. He gets a whole lot more than he bargained for. Gremlins is a hilariously funny, wickedly scary film, a bizarre Jekyll-and-Hyde creation that may have you alternately hiding your eyes and holding your sides with laughter. It starts out like a comfortable situation comedy, quickly takes several weird turns for the worse and winds up in a funhouse bacchanal to make a witches' Sabbath look like a Sunday school square dance. If you saw The Howling or the highly rated "It's a Good Life" chapter of Twilight Zone - The Movie, you already have a good idea of director Joe Dante's delirious visual magic. In a Dante movie, things go wrong. And all you can do is hold on for dear life and hope that you're still in one piece at the end of the ride. Special effects wizard Chris Walas brought his own magic to the title-role creatures in both lovable and terrible incarnations. "Of course. It's impossible to do," Wales said when he first read the script, "so let's do it." The result of his labour is a horde of knee-high demons able to move in surprising - and savage - ways. Of the gremlins themselves, executive producer Steven Spielberg said, "If they could speak English. they'd probably say 'Lets party!'" But party time for gremlins is panic time for humans. In a startling sequence of the sheerest black comedy, Billy's mother defends her middle-American kitchen against an onslaught of gremlin mayhem - with marvellously vicious results. Hysterical, vicious, irreverent, even good, clean fun - Gremlins is all this and more. Got your head wet, help yourself to a midnight snack and enjoy the show. ©1984 Warner Bros. Inc