For a franchise that has been dormant since 1991 no one was expecting much from Critters: Attack! Apart from the appalling eight-episode streaming series that run at ten minutes each there has been nothing from the Critters franchise for a very long time, they barely got released on Blu-ray. Warner/New Line seem to be somewhat keen to keep it alive as a TV movie/DVD franchise and while Critters Attack (the colon and exclamation point in the title are problematic, so I'm missing them out from now on) is mildly enjoyable it doesn't do much other than keep the engine running and build new brand awareness. The original Critters was the best of the Gremlins rip-offs, and if they can turn it into a similar cash cow in the form of toys and merchandise there might be more of these to come, which is likely why the Gremlins textures are amped up for this sequel.
When a delivery boy is dragged off into the night by Krites after their ship lands in the wilderness lonely teenager Drea and her younger brother Philip find themselves in the middle of a new Krite invasion. Before the carnage begins they agree to babysit for a college professor and take the kids for a walk in the forest. I was a little confused as to the ages of these characters though. The girl being babysat seems to be 15, with the body of an 11-year-old, and the face of a woman in her late 20s. She might even be older than the actor playing Philip. It's so odd. The boy playing her younger brother is supposed to be aged 9 but has a voice that broke years ago.
In the forest they discover the frightened "Bianca" - an injured "good" Krite who has come to Earth to stop the bad Krites, meanwhile a bounty hunter called Aunt Dee (Dee Wallace Stone, kinda but kinda not reprising her role from the first film) picks up the signal of the landing Krite ship and begins her own hunt with, what appears to be, an updated Ghostbusters PKE meter.
There's a lot of components here and the movie really ought to cut back and forth between them as a consistent pace but there's just no energy to it. There are plot threads that just stop with no conclusion. The original Critters kept throwing wildly imaginative new developments at us every five to ten minutes, getting the series off to a bizarre but highly charged start. By comparison, Critters Attack is a bit more downbeat and subdued. There's no atmosphere to the photography or set pieces at all, the Deus Ex-inspired score is totally at odds with whatever tone they were going for. It would have been better to bring back David Newman to bring the series score full circle and connect it to its roots more.
It seems that the soul of Critters is missing here. The original movie had a theme of quiet Americana being disrupted by wild intergalactic anarchy. Critters Attack, being shot in South Africa, feels and looks bland, despite quite a few stunning locations being featured. There's no hometown heart, and it's a million miles from Grover's Bend, Kansas. Despite the swift 89-minute running times it's the longest movie in the series, and the first to be rated R, while the others were rather lenient PG-13s.
The creature effects are fun, and the movie is infrequently gore just about enough to make it passable. In the hands of a better director and with more imaginatative photography this could have been a solid made-for-TV movie. As it is, it's just for hardcore fans, and if Warner were expecting this to reinvigore the series they might regret the abrupt ending that hints are more to come. A stronger effort needs to be made next time.
As a footnote, I have to say that the excuse given by Dee Wallace that her character is "Aunt Dee" instead of "Helen Brown" because of "rights issues" doesn't make sense. Domonic Muir wrote the original screenplay for the first Critters. He died in 2010. Warner owns the rights to Critters. Not the Muir estate. This reeks of a cover-up. Very strange.
When a delivery boy is dragged off into the night by Krites after their ship lands in the wilderness lonely teenager Drea and her younger brother Philip find themselves in the middle of a new Krite invasion. Before the carnage begins they agree to babysit for a college professor and take the kids for a walk in the forest. I was a little confused as to the ages of these characters though. The girl being babysat seems to be 15, with the body of an 11-year-old, and the face of a woman in her late 20s. She might even be older than the actor playing Philip. It's so odd. The boy playing her younger brother is supposed to be aged 9 but has a voice that broke years ago.
In the forest they discover the frightened "Bianca" - an injured "good" Krite who has come to Earth to stop the bad Krites, meanwhile a bounty hunter called Aunt Dee (Dee Wallace Stone, kinda but kinda not reprising her role from the first film) picks up the signal of the landing Krite ship and begins her own hunt with, what appears to be, an updated Ghostbusters PKE meter.
There's a lot of components here and the movie really ought to cut back and forth between them as a consistent pace but there's just no energy to it. There are plot threads that just stop with no conclusion. The original Critters kept throwing wildly imaginative new developments at us every five to ten minutes, getting the series off to a bizarre but highly charged start. By comparison, Critters Attack is a bit more downbeat and subdued. There's no atmosphere to the photography or set pieces at all, the Deus Ex-inspired score is totally at odds with whatever tone they were going for. It would have been better to bring back David Newman to bring the series score full circle and connect it to its roots more.
It seems that the soul of Critters is missing here. The original movie had a theme of quiet Americana being disrupted by wild intergalactic anarchy. Critters Attack, being shot in South Africa, feels and looks bland, despite quite a few stunning locations being featured. There's no hometown heart, and it's a million miles from Grover's Bend, Kansas. Despite the swift 89-minute running times it's the longest movie in the series, and the first to be rated R, while the others were rather lenient PG-13s.
The creature effects are fun, and the movie is infrequently gore just about enough to make it passable. In the hands of a better director and with more imaginatative photography this could have been a solid made-for-TV movie. As it is, it's just for hardcore fans, and if Warner were expecting this to reinvigore the series they might regret the abrupt ending that hints are more to come. A stronger effort needs to be made next time.
As a footnote, I have to say that the excuse given by Dee Wallace that her character is "Aunt Dee" instead of "Helen Brown" because of "rights issues" doesn't make sense. Domonic Muir wrote the original screenplay for the first Critters. He died in 2010. Warner owns the rights to Critters. Not the Muir estate. This reeks of a cover-up. Very strange.