Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

"I am the camera."
-Mr. Katsuji



After the events of the first film, Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) and Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates) have moved to New York City and acquired jobs in the Clamp Center, a state-of-the-art building owned by Daniel Clamp (John Glover).  Billy discovers his old friend Gizmo (Howie Mandel) being used as a guinea pig in a genetics lab and breaks him out, but soon after, Gizmo gets wet and multiplies.  With new gremlins running around, Billy, Kate, and Gizmo have to stop them before they eat after midnight and transform or worse...use the chemicals in the genetics lab to make themselves even more powerful.


What Works:

As I said in my review of the original Gremlins, Gizmo is one of my all time favorite movie characters and although he is sidelined for the majority of this movie, I still love the little guy.  He's adorable, yet badass.  We don't get a lot of Gizmo, but I like most of what we get with him.

The only other thing I like about Gremlins 2: The New Batch is the practical effects.  The gremlins look great and there is some excellent craft put into the design and the effects.  A few of the gremlin kills look solid as well.


What Sucks:

I'm going to go ahead and award Gremlins 2 the award for Most Obnoxious Movie of All Time.  If you saw my review of the original film, you'll know the only thing I don't like about it is the bar sequence.  It's too much and goes on for way too long.  Gremlins 2 basically takes the bar scene and stretches it out to almost 2 hours.  It's pretty unbearable as the movie is pretty much a live-action cartoon with the gremlins and most of the characters being way to over-the-top.  It's basically just one massive headache.

One reason I loved the original film is that there was a lot of really dark humor.  An old woman being flung out of her house, Kate's dad dying in a chimney on Christmas, etc...It's a very funny, yet morbid.  Like I said above, Gremlins 2 is basically a cartoon and ditches pretty much all of the darkness that made the original film so fun and what we're left with instead is...well...not fun.

Not only were the gremlins annoying and obnoxious, but some of the human characters were as well.  Worst of all was Marla Bloodstone (Haviland Morris), Billy's annoying coworker with an atrocious accent.  She contributes nothing positive to the film, yet receives a happy ending where she gets promoted.  This is the perfect kind of character to give an insane death scene too and it's a shame we don't get it.

I also mentioned above that Gizmo is sidelined for most of the movie.  He's pretty much absent from the entire second act.  We only see him occasionally getting tortured by the other gremlins.  That is not what I wanted to see out of this movie and these scenes rubbed me the wrong way.  Leave Gizmo alone!

Finally, I typically enjoy meta elements in movies, but having Leonard Maltin and Hulk Hogan break the 4th wall so blatantly just annoyed me some more.  All they did was remind of how great the first movie was.  Maybe if the rest of the movie had been stronger I wouldn't have minded so much, but all these scenes did was contributed to my distaste for the film.


Verdict:

I love the original Gremlins, but I hated Gremlins 2: The New Batch.  I can appreciate what director Joe Dante was trying to do, it has great practical effects, and Gizmo is just the best, but this movie is so obnoxious on every level I could barely sit through it.  It's missing almost everything that made the first film so wonderful and is one of the most disappointing sequels I have ever seen.  Go and watch the Key & Peele sketch about Gremlins 2 and you'll get an idea about what it's like, but stay far away from The New Batch. 

 2/10: Awful    


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