[Warner Bros.] said, “We really, really want a sequel to Gremlins. We want it for this summer. And if you’ll do it, we’ll let you do whatever you want. As long as it has Gremlins in it, you can do it.”
So recounts Joe Dante in a 30th-anniversary oral history about Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). Warner Bros. would rue handing him that blank check, as the film failed to replicate the runaway box office success of the first Gremlins (1984). Even as recently as 2015, the overriding theme of a viral Key & Peele sketch about the movie is a bemused disbelief at its existence. We know better now. The sea change in sentiment is best demonstrated by the Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies Twitter account, which drew enough of a following to be profiled in multiple features.
With The New Batch, Dante and his collaborators escalate the namesake characters from mere agents of chaos to embodiments of pure anarchy. As part of its mockery of unnecessary sequels and their “do everything again, but bigger” ethos, the plot transplants the lead human characters from their sleepy Amblin-core hometown of the first film to New York City. (Chris Columbus, who wrote the first Gremlins, did the exact same thing without a hint of irony in Home Alone 2 just a few years later.)
Dante and writer Charles S. Haas use their scaled-up milieu to satirize late ‘80s yuppie work culture. In the film, Daniel Clamp (John Glover), perhaps the kindest thinly veiled stand-in for Donald Trump to appear on a screen, has designed a “smart” office skyscraper. The High-Rise-esque setting facilitates the creatures proving themselves as Ballardian beings—most evident during a demented “talk show” sequence in which the sapient Brain Gremlin avers that they want “civilization,” while shooting another gremlin in the face and remarking that Broadway shows and street crime sound like equally appealing entertainment.
The New Batch openly defies the idea of having a plot; once the gremlins are loose, the film finds as many ways to have fun with them as possible, becoming increasingly detached from reality as it progresses. It is one of the most winningly cartoon-like live-action features ever made, with the toon-loving Dante even drawing the legend Chuck Jones out of retirement to lead the construction of animated Looney Tunes sequences. By the time a bat-like gremlin crashes through a wall and leaves a hole shaped like Batman’s symbol, it’s clear that any distinction between reality and animation is illusory. All this manic creature tomfoolery is realized through marvelous puppetry, with this film and Little Shop of Horrors (1986) likely representing the apex of the craft right before it was supplanted by CGI.
The New Batch was shot about half a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it hit theaters half a year after. It was a perfect movie for “The End of History.” There’s a unique strain of films that came out between November 1989 and September 2001 that feel like they only could have come out then. These works capture the uncertainty of a post-Cold-War era of Western economic prosperity and its supreme malaise—capitalism weeping as it felt it had no more worlds to conquer. Gen X irony, anxiety about the changes the inventions the ascendant Silicon Valley was bringing to society, and disquiet over the newly globalized world are rife through these works. Touchstones of this small but fascinating genre include Whit Stillman’s ‘90s trilogy, Demolition Man (1993), Strange Days (1995), Irma Vep (1996), Run Lola Run (1998), Fight Club (1999), The Matrix (1999), Josie and the Pussycats (2001), and everything Edward Yang made during this period. Before them all came Gremlins 2, blowing a raspberry at Manhattanite techno-solutionism. It’s appropriate that those sneaky stinkers, the gremlins, beat everyone to the punch.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch screens tonight, March 17, at Nitehawk Prospect Park on 35mm as part of the series “High Rise Horror.”
