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You might get an argument on that description from Steven Spielberg, the fabulator of that alltime blockbuster and—surprise!—an executive producer of Gremlins. "If I thought this movie was close to E. T.," he claims, "I probably wouldn't have become associated with it." As it happens, there are plenty of similarities in plot and tone between E.T. and Gremlins: a sweet, lonely boy in a matriarchal family in a near idyllic small town meets a gentle, otherworldly creature who becomes his charge and his protector. But these comparisons are mainly for exegetes and archaeologists, for by mid-film Author Chris Columbus and Director Joe Dante have spun Gremlins off its smooth E. T. rails and launched it into the fetid backwaters of fantasyland.
Kingston Falls, U.S.A., the setting for Gremlins, is itself a dreamscape confected from congenial old slices of apple-pie Americana. Norman Rockwell might have painted the town's Main Street and the faces of the folks who stroll down it on this peaceful Christmas Eve. Frank Capra, Hollywood's master of sweet-and-sour sentimentality, could smile at the plight of Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan), the all-American boy who supports his family with a job at the Kingston Falls Bank and wins respect by standing up to the filthy-rich Mrs. Deagle (Polly Holliday). Preston Sturges, the movies' screw-bailer supreme, would have appreciated Billy's dad Rand (Hoyt Axton), an absent-minded inventor whose contraptions range from the Bathroom Buddy Shaving Kit to the Peltzer Peeler Juicer, which ingests oranges and splatters their pulp against the kitchen wall in Gremlins' first glint of far-out domestic violence.
Rand's Christmas present to his son is stranger and more wondrous than any of his own inventions: a little animal called a Mogwai, with a kitten's purr and the forlorn eyes of an orphan puppy. The creature, whom Billy's dad dubs Gizmo, arrives with enough warnings to fill a Tylenol label three times over: Keep him away from water; keep him out of the light; and never never feed him after midnight. A few drops of water inadvertently fall on Gizmo, and pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!, five living fur balls fly from his body: Mogwai in fetal form. Gizmo's mutant offspring look and act like Munchkins reborn as Hell's Angels. They have disgraceful eating habits; they turn the greeting-card village into a South Bronx shambles, then send old Mrs. Deagle into fatal orbit.
"Gremlins are not good," says Joe Dante. "You can't trust them. You don't want one for a pet. You don't want your daughter to marry one." And yet they are, undeniably, cute. Four of them stand outside a home wearing earmuffs and ski caps, caroling. Though their goals are to multiply and maraud, the gremlins are distracted by the slightest opportunity to forget it all and have fun, whether that means ransacking a department store or catching a midnight matinee of Snow White and singing "Heigh-ho" along with the Seven Dwarfs. "If they could speak English," notes Spielberg, "they'd probably say, 'Let's party!' It's how they party that can be hazardous to your health."