Written by Harry Russell

Set in the sleepy town of Kingston Falls, Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984) sees Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) accidentally unleash the murderous gremlins when he fails to follow the key rules of the mogwai. After finally dealing with the threat Billy must return the initial mogwai, Gizmo, and learn a lesson in responsibility spurred by his father’s unthinking gifting. Gremlins is a Christmas film first and foremost. Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante, 1990) is not.

Gremlins 2 sees Billy and his now fiancé Kate (Phoebe Cates) living in New York, both working different jobs in the high-tech Clamp Center, when one day Billy stumbles across Gizmo in a genetics laboratory, having been abducted after the death of his owner. Inevitably Gizmo ends up spawning more mogwai, who are of course unabashedly evil and immediately seek out food so as to reach their most destructive gremlin forms. If the idea of the sequel can be thought of as aiming to deliver more of the same pleasures that made us enjoy the first film, Gremlins 2 dares to ask if more is always good. From setting the piece almost entirely in the capitalist utopia that is the Clamp Center, to the way the film devolves at points into little more than slapstick gremlin vignettes, excess is the word of the day. Gremlins blows up a cinema from a distance, Gremlins 2 displays the electrocution and melting of hundreds of gremlins with every gory detail, whilst fitting in myriad references to pop-culture powerhouses (The Wizard of Oz, Phantom of the Opera, etc).

Arguably the main purpose of Gremlins 2 is to call attention to the audiences own lust for sequels, to offer them more in a way that the audience then rejects it as too much. Aside from the final massacre, many moments harken back to the original whilst also reducing them through one way or another, and the film is in on the joke. Kate attempts to make another speech about how she was scarred on a holiday, making her speech about Christmas in the first film seem silly and out of place in retrospect. A popular sketch by comedian duo Key and Peele imagines the creation of the different gremlin mutants as the meddling of a wacky studio ‘sequel doctor’, but ultimately it makes perfect sense for these mutant variants to be the next step for gremlins. As much as the original is a Christmas film, it is also a creature feature, and so audiences can be expected to want evolutions on the designs. It is only by taking this evolution to extremes that Dante is able to point out the inherently ludicrous nature of that desire.

Compared to the success of Gremlins, Gremlins 2 was a failure and a flop. Warner Bros. had been so desperate to obtain a sequel that they let Joe Dante create an anti-sequel. The film constantly jabs at its source, and through an anarchic love of chaos and silliness, it manages to question what the purpose of a sequel even is, if there’s any to be found at all.