In short: Critters Attack (2019)

I don’t know about you, but I dearly hope there’s nobody not wearing a suit who actually asked for another Critters sequel. Though, frankly, calling this thing an actual movie in the sense the other Critters movies were might be taking charity too far. At least with a bad backyard indie movie, you’ll witness something people have put actual love and (most probably misguided) effort in; this one doesn’t look that much better than a backyard indie would, but totally lacks any suggestion of the filmmakers giving a crap about making a movie, let’s not even speak of an entertaining one. It might as well have been made by robots.

The film-like entity is directed by Bobby Miller with such an impressive lack of verve and style, I do recommend a good bit of coffee for anyone willing to make it through this thing. The whole affair follows some poor young actors - whom I’m not going to hold responsible for the film they are in - pointlessly running around with a good, female Critter in tow (who is of course looking like it’s wearing make-up, because it is a girl, ugh) while supposed jokes happen.


From time to time, someone gets killed in a “funny” way that isn’t funny or interesting to look at; poor old Dee Wallace is apparently now an elderly bounty hunter and pops up in the sort of badly integrated cameo you may know from action movies featuring Dolph Lundgren or JCVD (alas without a scene where she tortures someone while shooting a video for her cooking channel, because that would be actually funny and/or weird). The script by Scott Lobdell (who is about as competent a scriptwriter as he is a comics writer, it seems – that’s not a compliment) is badly paced, full of jokes that don’t hit and characters nobody gives a toss about, going through the motions of a plot nobody making this gave one about either. And even though the Critters franchise always had more than a little of the soul of the cheap cash-in, its films generally seem to have been made with a mind to actually entertain an audience, so it really deserved better than it got with this one.