Gremlins 2 movie facts
I know its nowhere near the festive season but..... Gizmo has put on a red bandana, picked up a bow and decided that being adorable is no longer an adequate response to his working conditions.
Quite right, too.
The first Gremlins belongs to Christmas. Snow on the pavement, lights in the windows, something dreadful happening beneath the comforting glow of small town America. Gremlins 2: The New Batch belongs to a different kind of nightmare: being trapped at work while the building’s expensive technology makes everything worse.
Released in 1990, it moved the trouble from Kingston Falls to a Manhattan tower full of television studios, laboratories, automated announcements and people who presumably used the word “synergy” without supervision. Watching it now, the creatures seem less like an infestation than the only occupants responding sensibly.
Joe Dante had initially refused to direct a sequel. He considered the original finished, and making it had hardly been a relaxing afternoon. The studio explored other possibilities, including sending the gremlins to Las Vegas or Mars, before returning to him with the sort of offer directors rarely receive: creative control.
He used it to make a sequel that appears to have developed an allergy to being a sequel.
Joe Dante, 2023. Photo: Super Festivals, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0. Used without modification.
Even the opening refuses to behave. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck squabble over the Warner Bros. logo in animation directed by Chuck Jones. Before Billy has had time to look worried, the film has told you exactly what sort of evening this is going to be. Expect cartoons. Do not expect the furniture to survive.
The human cast understands the assignment beautifully. John Glover’s Daniel Clamp could have been a straightforward corporate villain, a mixture of Donald Trump and Ted Turner with an enormous building and a corresponding opinion of himself. Instead, Glover makes him almost disarmingly enthusiastic. Clamp is delighted by his own inventions, impressed by Billy’s drawings and oddly willing to accept that his property has become a reptilian cabaret.
It makes him much funnier than another sneering billionaire. He has the air of a man who would describe a lift malfunction as an exciting opportunity to take the stairs.
Glover later became Lionel Luthor in Smallville, where the paternal warmth came with considerably more menace. He also voiced the Riddler in Batman: The Animated Series and won a Tony for Love! Valour! Compassion! There is rather more to Daniel Clamp than a good suit and an optimistic response to structural damage.
Then there is Christopher Lee, lending magnificent seriousness to a laboratory that absolutely does not deserve it. His scientist is called Doctor Cushing Catheter. The Cushing is a nod to Peter Cushing, his friend and fellow Hammer legend; the rest of the name is best left to the screenwriter’s conscience.
A deleted scene even gave Lee a line about bats feeding on blood. Having Dracula inspect the local wildlife was evidently too good an opportunity to resist.
Christopher Lee, 2009. Photo: Manfred Werner / Tsui; source crop by Dr. Blofeld. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 3.0. Source image used without further modification.
The film rewards that sort of recognition, but never requires it. You can know your Hammer horror, your old Hollywood musicals and your Chuck Jones, or you can simply enjoy a vegetable gremlin. Both are perfectly respectable ways to spend an evening.
Rick Baker’s involvement helps explain why the creatures are such a glorious assortment. He had initially been reluctant to take over from Chris Walas, who created the original film’s effects. The opportunity to give the new batch more variety helped persuade him.
And variety is what you get. Teeth, ears, hairstyles, unpleasant little expressions. The laboratory then supplies the sort of refreshments that turn an already difficult crowd into a spider, a bat and a being made of electricity.
Two of the mogwai were named George and Lenny after the characters in Of Mice and Men. Somewhere between the buck teeth and the laboratory mayhem, this ridiculous monster film has quietly slipped Steinbeck into the room.
The Brain Gremlin, voiced by Tony Randall, is another splendid invention. Give a gremlin intelligence and it does not become responsible. It becomes articulate enough to explain why it intends to remain irresponsible. Soon it is leading “New York, New York”, with the confidence of a performer who knows the management cannot possibly afford to sack the entire chorus.
The best joke, though, may be the one that changed according to where you watched the film.
In cinemas, the gremlins apparently wrecked the projection. The picture broke down, shadow puppets appeared and Hulk Hogan had to threaten the creatures into putting the proper film back on.
For VHS, Dante and company made a different interruption. Now the gremlins seemed to have got inside your video player, meddling with the television picture until John Wayne, appearing through footage from Chisum, intervened.
So if you remember Wayne and somebody else swears it was Hogan, neither of you needs to surrender your memory. The film had different ways of misbehaving.
That is a lovely piece of consideration for the audience, really. A gag about a broken cinema projector would still have worked at home, but making the trouble appear to come from your own video machine brought it into the sitting room. This was an era when the tracking control already seemed to operate according to supernatural principles. Gremlins were a credible diagnosis.
Even David Bischoff’s novelisation joined in. Its version of the interruption has the Brain Gremlin lock the author in the bathroom and take over the book.
Most film tie ins were content to put a few photographs in the middle. This one staged a literary hostage situation.
There are other familiar faces hiding in the chaos. Dean Norris appears as a member of the SWAT team, long before Breaking Bad made him Hank Schrader. Raymond Cruz turns up as a delivery man, years before playing Tuco Salamanca. It is probably wise that neither of their later characters was responsible for customer service at Clamp Centre.
Robert Picardo, meanwhile, plays the thoroughly unhelpful security chief Forster. He later became the Emergency Medical Hologram in Star Trek: Voyager, trading corporate obstruction for bedside manner, although not entirely abandoning the look of a man disappointed by everyone around him. He was also the voice and face of Johnny Cab in Total Recall, another 1990 encounter with technology that really ought to have been tested more carefully.
Phoebe Cates took a different route after her film career. She stepped away from regular acting, briefly returned for The Anniversary Party, and opened her New York boutique, Blue Tree, in 2005. There is something pleasing about Kate Beringer eventually exchanging Clamp’s vast, impersonal commercial world for a shop of her own.
And through all of this, there is Gizmo.
For much of the film he is bullied, shut away and treated appallingly by creatures whose existence is, admittedly, connected to his own unfortunate relationship with water. Eventually he has had enough. Rambo supplies the inspiration. A red bandana supplies the attitude.
The musical joke is particularly neat. Jerry Goldsmith, who composed the Gremlins scores, had also scored the first three Rambo films. When Gizmo prepares for battle, Goldsmith gives his little hero’s music a Rambo flavour. The transformation has the right composer behind it as well as the right headwear.
Battle Ready Gizmo and an unopened Topps pack from 1990. Photo: Old’s Cool.
That determined little version is the one in our Gremlins 2 Battle Ready Gizmo set, pairing the 2026 Super7 figure with an unopened Topps pack from 1990, original gum included. The gum is for collecting, not chewing. Some childhood experiences are better left sealed.
Gremlins 2 was not the enormous box office success its predecessor had been. It opened in America on the same day as Dick Tracy, which cannot have helped. But it has aged into something far more interesting than an obedient follow up.
The things it finds absurd are still here. Buildings that promise to think for us. Television filling every available silence. Corporate confidence completely untouched by evidence. A laboratory doing something alarming because nobody has thought to ask whether it should.
The monsters remain wonderful, but the humans have become more recognisable.
Put it on again and there will probably be a joke you missed, a face you now recognise or some tiny piece of background nonsense waiting patiently since 1990.
And when Gizmo finally tightens that bandana, you may find yourself cheering rather more loudly than you did as a child.
By now, you have probably worked in the building.