In short: Critters (1986)

A shipful of furry, hungry and very rude aliens break out of prison and land near one of those archetypal US small towns the horror genre loves so dearly (to destroy) to get some lunch. Humans, cows - the Crites, as they are called, eat whatever you got, though the movie’s cat is a true survivor.

Particularly threatened is the Brown family – mother Helen (Dee Wallace), father Jay (Billy Green Bush), teenage daughter April (Nadine Van der Velde) and youngest Brad (Scott Grimes) – but since this is an 80s PG-13 movie, of their circle, only April’s new boyfriend (as portrayed by a young Billy Zane who wasn’t quite as disturbingly toothy an actor at this point in his life) gets eaten.

While the Earth authorities are rather slow in reacting, the space prison has sent two bounty hunters with shape-changing abilities to take care of the situation. One of them quickly takes on the appearance of a pop singer (Terrence Mann), while the other one has problems not having a new face pop up every two scenes. Not that they’re terrible great at killing the critters; they do have the whole wrecking a town thing down pat, though.

I’ve never loved Stephen Herek’s SF horror comedy quite as much as some people do. It is, admittedly, one of the better examples of the 80’s obsession with small furry monsters, but then, apart from Joe Dante’s Gremlins, that’s not exactly a corner of the genre full of great, or even decent, movies. Decent, at least, Critters certainly is. It mostly suffers from problems with follow-through and a curious unwillingness to actually milk its own ideas for comical effect. For example – and this is really only one of many - why create a fake music video and let one of the bounty hunters take on the singer’s appearance, but then not really use that as a running gag during the course of the movie?

The film also introduces way too many characters for its own good, jumping around between them in a way that does help neither the comedy nor suspense parts of the film, dragging things out much more than they should be dragged out, burying the better ideas and moments under stuff that’s just…there for no good reason.


Really great, however, are the special effects by the Chiodo Brothers and company, providing the little nasties with proper personalities, expressions, and finding design-wise exactly the right spot between funny and threatening. If that saves the film for a viewer is simply a matter of taste; it doesn’t for me, but then, I find most of the film simply neither terribly funny nor terribly exciting and have perhaps lost the patience for the whole US small town under threat thing.