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In the movie's wildest, wittiest sequence, the gremlins invade a neighborhood bar and turn it into Porky's Goes to the Star Wars Cantina. As Leading Man Galligan describes the scene, "They pick their noses, they snap their fingers, they drink lots of beer. One gremlin in a raincoat is a flasher. There's a Jennifer Beals gremlin who breakdances. Five gremlins play poker; one of them accuses another of cheating and another shoots him dead with a gun. They are little satirists, walking parodies of humanity." The sequence suggests ingenuity rampant on a field of lunacy. There has been nothing quite like it since they shut down Termite Terrace, the Warner Bros, cartoon shop.
The brain that hatched Gremlins was 21 years old at the time and productively disturbed. In the summer of 1981, Chris Columbus, a former student at the New York University Film School, was living in a loft in the garment district of Manhattan. "When I went to sleep at night," he recalls, "I could hear mice scurrying along the floor. I slept with my arm draped over the side of the bed, hanging just above floor level, and I kept having this nightmare of waking up with a mouse nibbling on my fingers. That's how I got the idea for Gremlins. "His imagination stoked by a young lifetime of reading Marvel Comic books, watching old Universal horror movies and collecting clay models of monsters, Columbus set to exorcising his tiny demons in a screenplay. By the end of that year, his script had found its way to the desk of Steven Spielberg.
Hollywood discovered future shock in its infancy; new "generations" of talent can arrive every few years, encouraged by the new Old Guard. With Gremlins Spielberg, 36, has played godfather to two successive waves of moviemakers: Dante, 36, and Columbus, now all of 25, who is at work writing another script for his mentor. Says Spielberg: "You can drop a stone into the black hole of Chris' imagination and never hear it hit bottom. I'd never thought about directing Gremlins myself—I wanted to take a long vacation from anything with a wire trailing from its rear end that makes a creature smile when you pull it—but Joe seemed perfect for the job."
Like Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles and Paul Bartel, Dante is an honors graduate of the Roger Corman night school of no-budget film making. Working for slave wages at Gorman's New World Pictures in the mid-'70s, Dante learned how to finesse movies on a frayed shoestring. He and Co-Director Allan Arkush shot their first film, Hollywood Boulevard, for a niggardly $60,000 in 1976. Dante's solo directorial debut, the 1978 Piranha, was made for slightly in excess of $1 million. In this fleet-wilted Jaws parody one could see early signs of the Dante style, which keeps tickling the spectator to remember that, in Alfred Hitchcock's famous phrase, "Ingrid, it's only a movie." At the film's ostensibly terrifying climax, when a school of nasty little razor-toothed fish has launched an attack on a lake full of summer campers, one of the piranha leaps out of the water and bites the camp's pompous counselor on the snout.