Gadgetory

what do you picture when you hear gremlins cuddly animatronics slapstick monsters the simple story of a young man learning to be a responsible pet owner to celebrate this Christmas season I rewatched gremlins is it still the joyful children's movie I played on loop as a kid a synopsis in case it's been a while since you watch the film a middle-aged inventor named Randall Peltzer steals an adorable creature called a Mogwai from a Chinatown shop owner the inventor gives this creature to his son Billy as a christmas thing and his fan names a gizmo Randall explains that to raise a healthy gizmo Billy must obey these three rules but you got to keep him out of the sunlight sunlight will kill you number two keep them away from water don't give them any water to drink and whatever you do don't give him a bath and probably the most important thing don't ever feed him after midnight Billie disobeys the rules water horses gizmo its birth many more Mogwai and eating after midnight transformed fed Mogwai into the titular gremlins gremlins caused chaos throughout the small town until they're killed at a scene I can only assume inspired Inglourious back the lead gremlin naturally survives the explosion but is killed in a fabulously graphic manner by gizmo and extra helping of daylan's in the end the Chinatown store owner returns for gizmo and the world just assumes riots caused all this damage because in 1983 nobody had cameras or apparently memories and now the five parts of gremlins I had forgotten entirely some are good some are bad all had been obliterated from my memory number one filly is the protagonist but he's basically a spectator in his own movie his dad brings gizmo into the movie corey feldman creates the first batch of Mogwai his mom and pv hater Matthews and gizmo himself ultimately saves the day you could remove Billy from the movie and the movie would just be fine without him I would've fired you in a second number two phoebe cates phoebe cates plays a two dimensional love interest until an out of left field monologue about her father dressing up as Santa Claus and getting stuck in the chimney only to be discovered dead days later that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus number three a school science teacher serves little purpose in the movie except to die at the hands of the directors love for German Expressionism look at those Dutch angles number four it leaves mom the movie flirts with excellence during a single scene right in the middle of the film Billy's mother Lin doesn't know gremlins are deadly yet but she brutally murders a bushel of them without hesitation a version of the film in which she goes full ripley killing every gremlin in town as the gremlins remake we deserve but all of this stuff good and bad takes a backseat to the real forgotten problem of the movie gremlins you got you got away shopping with foreigners because they plant gremlins in the machinery it's super racist like great-grandpa talking about the war racist in the first scene the store owner is dressed as a crew two Asian caricature complete with glass eye wispy beard an opium pipe we get lines like this you got yourself a bad case dragon breath we get sound cues like this and we see set decorations like this in the very next scene we meet our hero Billy but we also meet his do good but casually racist neighbor who believes that during World War two Japan snuck little gremlins into all of our machinery and they've been causing havoc ever since you don't find American machinery doing that my stuff can take anything it's a problem is this crackpot racist theory is in the universe of the film a hundred percent correct a handful of characters are killed in the film the neighbor among them and we're supposed to hate these characters because they're presented as racist in the movie but how am I supposed to hate the racist dude when his racist rant correctly predicts a flood of mythical house fun here's the neighbours own word that's right well watch you WWII is still shipping them over there now I thought perhaps the neighbours rant was only partially cracked sure gremlins exists but they aren't some menaces descent from the quote-unquote east toward America they're just monsters but then at the end of the film we get this warning so if your air conditioner goes on the fritz or your washing machine blows up or your video recorder cocks out before you call the repairmen turn on all the lights check all the closets and cupboards look under all the beds cuz you never can tell there just might be a gremlin in your house just remember it could be the death creatures set over by Japan by way of a shop in Chinatown I've been trying to understand how this got made and all I can assume is gremlins speaks to a broad anxiety in America in the 1980s about the rapid rise of Japanese technology that the same fears that inspired parent groups to attack Pokemon made gremlins now obvious problems seemed palatable in my opinion parents should not let their kids watch pokemon play pokemon buy pokemon cards have anything whatsoever to do with pokemons because the message is violence neither a cartoonish screwball comedy or a moralistic children's from gremlins is just a racist parable about a mythical species sent from unspecified Asian nation no joke that is the entire point of the movie so yeah my memory was kind of right the animatronics are still cute there's some slapstick humor like this Flashdance bit but mostly my memory was wrong as a movie its protagonist as a dud its characters actions barely make sense and it's only mortal is they're all out to get us doesn't hold up no not at all I didn't watch gremlins too but I can only assume it's much better right right right