Gizmo the cute Mogwai is back, and he gets wet again — this time in a New York City skyscraper run by a Donald Trump-like billionaire. Billy Peltzer and Kate Beringer (returning stars Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates) both work there and re-team with their furry companion just in time to do battle with another army of nasty gremlins. This sequel to the 1984 original is more a madcap comedy than a horror movie, with none of the fable quality or dark atmosphere of the first film. The script is meager enough to allow for large blocks of gremlins shenanigans that overwhelm the movie. This is good if you like monster mayhem, bad if you like a little more in your creature features. While the animatronics and special effects are far superior to those in the first film, director Joe Dante (The Howling, Explorers) indulges in a display of technological prowess that spirals into a busily boring mess before things are over.
I usually appreciate an interesting mess more than a tidy bore. So sue me: Yes, I like one of the most famous bad movies of the last few decades. You wanna fight about it?
Somehow, Roger Corman’s rip-offs tend to be the best around. This one takes aim at Alien, centering around a team of scientists who accidentally breed a genetic mutant that escapes and starts eating them, all one by one. The dialogue is atrocious in a ‘so bad, it’s good’ kinda way and the special effects are hit-and-miss, but Tim Suhrstedt’s cinematography is far better than usual for B-movie’s of this sort. Since Corman’s involved, you also get a healthy dose of extraneous sex and boobage. Director Allan Holzman inter-cuts one of the sex scenes with a kill sequence to interesting effect, and you have to love it when dull exposition is delivered by two female scientists while they sponge-bathe each other in the shower.
Pacific Rim is good, dumb summer fun. It’s beautiful, sexy, exciting, funny, and it kinda made me feel like a kid again. The premise involves Kaiju and Jägers… scratch that. Let’s call it like it is: this movie is about big fucking robots fighting big fucking monsters. The monsters come from another dimension, entering our world from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The robots, each manned by two psychically linked people (often blood relatives), are humanity’s last hope for survival. The concept sounds like the germ of another big, loud, stupid summer movie — you know, the kind Michael Bay makes. But director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) handily beats Bay at his own game with Pacific Rim, imbuing the film with more style and substance than any of Bay’s Transformers movies ever had.
