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.

In short: Night Life (1989)

Teenager Archie Melville (Scott Grimes) does not have the easiest of lives. He's a somewhat sarcastic nerd in a high school full of jocks and jockettes (that's the technical term) with a tendency for violence. Consequently, Archie's very bad at not provoking his enemies, because, unlike the kind of nerd with a survival instinct, he just doesn't know when to shut up. His only friend is female mechanic Charly (Cheryl Pollak in one of those weird "put some baggy clothes and motor oil on the prettiest girl in the movie and pretend she's much less attractive than the boring cheerleaders surrounding her until she dresses more traditionally womanly in a later scene" performances movies love for no discernible reason), but their obvious mutual crush is of course unspoken.

Because Archie's also piss-poor, his only chance at escaping from small town hell lies in working for his uncle (or "uncle"?) Verlin Flanders (John Astin), the owner of the local funeral parlour, in the hope that this particular specimen of cynical bastard will pay his college tuition. Of course, Flanders treats the situation as an opportunity to have his own teenage serf.

After playing a particularly nasty "practical joke" on Archie, his four main jock(ette) nemeses die in an off-screen car crash. Alas, the funeral parlour is hit by lightning during a storm before their bodies are interred, and we all know what the combination of dead people and electricity leads to: the undead! Turns out jocks are even nastier when they are the living dead, and Archie and Charly will have to use all of their brains to escape the night alive.

David Acomba's Night Life is one of those surprisingly decent movies I never expect to stumble upon when watching random horror films I've never heard of before.The film is not, of course, what I'd call a lost classic, but it's an example of more than competent low budget filmmaking of a kind I'd wish more people had the opportunity to see. As it stands, Night Life doesn't seem to have been re-issued during the DVD age at all, not even as a straight transfer from laser disc which really is a bit of a shame.

Anyway, Night Life starts out rather slowly, really taking its time introducing the audience to Archie's unhappy life, only getting to the actual horror content after about an hour. Undead teens and violence are more costly than black teenage comedy, after all. Unlike in many other movies of this kind, the hour before the shit hits the fan isn't - for the most part - a chore to get through. The broad black humour is funny more often than it is not, and the film's characters turn out to be slightly more interesting than absolutely necessary. In a film with this type of set-up, it's actually nice, even somewhat original, to have a nerd who isn't only the battered victim of circumstances and footballers but actually a bit of a smart-ass, as well as the owner of enough confidence to work a difficult job beside his school time.

This kind of thing goes a long way to help a film stand out among its peers, but it would of course not be enough if the final thirty minutes (aka the horror part) weren't any good. Fortunately, they are. Acomba demonstrates the ability to milk a clearly low budget for as much as it is worth, resulting in a handful of (Argento-blue) moody moments, a bit of gore, and some well-staged action. Night Life's climax is a truly satisfying one, capping an entertaining ninety minutes appropriately.

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