Joe Dante didn’t want to make this movie and, oddly, that’s why it’s so good. This is one of the craziest mainstream Hollywood blockbuster sequels ever. To Dante, there was no reason for a Gremlins sequel to even exist. It’s a bunch of little monsters that like to chew on your face. Dante already made the best movie that he could make about that. Where else can you go with it that’s worth at least a year of a director’s life?
Then Warner Bros. came to him, hat in hand—they tried to get a sequel off the ground without him, but nothing ever worked out—and not only threw a pile of money at him but also promised him creative freedom. Dante could do whatever he wanted as long as it fit into the budget and had gremlins in it.
That’s not something that happens everyday. Dante HAD to say yes. Meanwhile, he still thought that the whole idea was stupid.
So, THAT became this film’s aesthetic. It would provide a few easy thrills, but it would take nothing seriously. It would be a film that knows full well that it’s completely unnecessary. It wouldn’t attempt to expand the “saga” of the gremlins. It wouldn’t try to compete with the original film’s balance of comedy and horror and kiddie appeal. This would be a truly weightless film, while also being entertaining. A manic jokefest. A crazed parody. An assault on logic. Total anarchy. Dante wasn’t nurturing the franchise; he was torching it. Burning it to the ground. He was up for ANYTHING that kept up his interest in this bullshit.
To do that, Dante grounded this film in the idea that it’s a live-action cartoon. The old Looney Tunes, specifically. With an admirable lack of subtlety, he announces this right away with the pre-credits Bugs and Daffy routine, animated by Chuck Jones himself. Logic never matters in cartoons. Anything can happen at any moment.
Same aesthetic applies here. Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) is in New York City. Cutesy-pie mogwai Gizmo (voiced by Howie Mandel) is also in New York City. Among a population of about twelve million, they just happen to run into each other again and the film makes no big deal about the coincidence. Do the old cartoons ever explain why the roadrunner keeps tangling with the same coyote over and over? No. So, this film won’t, either. If you’re uptight about that detail, this film proceeds to drop about two more tons of camp on your head that’ll scramble your eggs good and hard. I’m talkin’ musical numbers. I’m talkin’ crazy new gremlins designed by Rick Baker. I’m talkin’ a perfectly ridiculous, and oddly likable, parody of Donald Trump (Donald Glover) back when he was just America’s most famous rich businessman.
Its supporting characters are all perfectly cartoonish. Christopher Lee is a mad scientist with corporate backing. Dante stalwart Dick Miller is back and as xenophobic as ever (we thought he died in the first movie, but NOPE; he was just injured and is now fully recovered, albeit with a little PTSD). Robert Prosky is a cable television horror host who really wants to be a news anchor and whom we never see outside of his Lugosi Dracula get-up. Most impressive though is Haviland Morris’s marvelous Marla, Billy’s boss at his corporate job and who sports an imposing head of instantly recognizable flaming red curls, as well as an ever-present gray suit, smoldering cigarette and outrageous New York accent.
It’s the opposite of most sequels and reboots today. Most of them try to get more realistic and serious and committed to their “world-building”.
Meanwhile, all that Gremlins 2 wants to do is hang out and party all night long. Joe Dante is one of those old school Saturday matinee movie buffs. His idea of a great sequel is probably Bride of Frankenstein, which itself was a parody and a deconstruction of the previous movie that turned everything about it into the stuff of comedy. That film joins a whole complicated maze of old movie influences here that add up to something frivolous and frothy and silly and strange and a real breath of fresh air, even all of these years later.