(4 of 5)
Any Joe Dante movie is a lot like the now vicious, now mischievous gremlins. He adroitly makes his characters seem to aim straight for the jugular, then along the way, find something more diverting to do with all that energy. Whenever the occasion permits, Dante loves to undercut the visceral impact of the horror genre with a clip from an old movie or a spitballing, pratfalling sight gag. His loopy werewolf melodrama, The Howling (1981), and his profligately imaginative episode of last year's Twilight Zone: The Movie are both energized by this sly schizophrenia. In Twilight Zone, the smile becomes a rictus as a child forces adults to live inside a cartoon world of jack-in-the-box monsters and junk food. In a sense, then, Gremlins is Dante's breakthrough film. It delivers both gore and guffaws, and, more impressively, blends the two moods to create this season's funkiest fable. Originally, Dante's gremlins were neither intelligent nor impishly charming. "They liked to eat," he says. "That's all they did. They would eat people's legs off, chew people's fingers. They ate Billy's dog. They killed Billy's mom, and her head flew down the Starrs. It was kind of grim." In its final form Gremlins is "soft" enough to have won a PG rating. Says Spielberg, who has managed to make three horror or science-fiction movies (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, E. T.) in which not a single person dies: "I'm not sure if anybody really dies in this one either. I never saw the gremlins as homicidal, psychotic, maniacal killers. Perhaps they are the dark side of the founding father of creatures great and small: they're Walt Disney's id."
Well, no. The gremlins really are an army of latex-skinned puppets devised by Special Effects Maven Chris Walas (Piranha, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and assembled for a bargain-basement $1.3 million. (By contrast, Carlo Rambaldi's E.T. creature alone cost $1.5 million.) The greenish-brown monsters, standing 23 in. tall with their 10-in. bat ears, were controlled by hands, cables, rods, radio signals and a simple but effective method that Walas describes as "throw-'em-across-the-room puppetry." The most complicated gremlin had 60 cables operated by a dozen technicians standing 8 ft. to 10 ft. away; "super-faces" were designed for Gizmo and his gremlin archrival Stripe, with some 36 cables that controlled character movement of eyes, brow, mouth and nostrils.
"Every shot required different gremlins," Walas says. "We created twelve versions of Gizmo, and 14 Stripes, each used in a different closeup or for a specific movement or to express a new emotion. One gremlin had to be able to inhale and exhale cigarette smoke. Another had to throw dishes at Billy's mother, and another had to ride its skateboard through the department store. With all the rewriting of the script during production, we were making puppets until the last days of shooting."