Critters (1986)

For some time now I have been wanting to make my way through a classic 80's horror franchise like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street. I have seen none of those movies and at some point would like to see at least a few, principally for reasons of film literacy, in this case low brow film literacy. Anyway as a possible appetizer, and because I saw an intriguing video about the franchise on Red Letter Media, I decided to view the four films in the Critters series. I have seen none of these films before, and until recently I knew next to nothing about the series other then finding the poster kind of scary as a child.

The first film Critters is very much an 80's movie in the Stranger Things sense of an 80's movie. If I didn't know it was an actual period product I could almost believe it was an homage there too. The Critters are, basically Gremlins, arguably more mean spirited, there's some Invaders from Mars here, maybe a little Last Starfighter. The opening sequence in space reminded me some of Night of the Creeps, and Dee Wallace is the mom in this so that's multiple 80's references, there is even a scene where a Critter interacts with a stuffed E.T. toy, which is kind of meta. Critters also known as Crites are a sort of galactic pest, little porcupine things with veracious appetites. Eight of them escape from an alien prison asteroid and are pursued by a pair of shape shifting bounty hunters, an invitation to various visual gages.

The Critters land in rural Grover's Bend Kansas, they attack a farm house while the space bounty hunters end up attacking the town. This is the film debut of Scott Grimes, then around 14 as Brad Brown. Don Keith Opper is Charlie McFadden, he's kind of a little slow, believes in aliens even before the Critters arrival and is apparently the only human character to be in all four films. M. Emmett Walsh is the sheriff, Billy Zane and Ethan Phillips have bit parts. It's a movie full of those requite 80's movie beats, it's formula but in a good way. A quite likeable film and not nearly as intense as I would have thought it would be as child, its rated PG-13 but I suspect most kids says 9 or over would be fine with it. I am going to give it a **1/2 in quality because it is more or less assembled from used parts and conventions, and not super cleverly either,  but it plays closer to a *** a fun watch.