According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Unfortunately, this week Jeffrey is being a very, very small baby, and he says he does not have time to provide his contribution, so Mike is taking over the Awkward Movie Challenge, making it considerably less challenging, but a whole lot more awkward.

Mike:

In many ways, I’m a sad specimen. When Gremlins debuted in theaters 25 years ago this past June 8th (the same day as Ghostbusters, incidentally), my friend from down the block asked me if I wanted to see it with his family. I backed out because… well, I was a great big chicken (for more evidence of that, check out the regular feature Things That Scare Me on my site Psychobabble). I was not fooled by that fluffy Gizmo thing being hawked at the local Toys ‘R Us. I knew that he was just the cutesy-pie bait used to lure impressionable 10-year olds like me into some sort of traumatizing orgy of disemboweling and face-slashing.

When I finally saw Gremlins after it debuted on HBO a year later, I didn’t find it particularly horrifying, although I did find it to be highly entertaining. Still, I wasn’t completely wrong in my initial assumption that Gremlins might be disturbing; I was only wrong in thinking it contained material that would disturb me (I was more frightened of humanoid creatures than the kinds of scaly beasties in this film, and I lived in terror of seeing any kind of graphic eviscerating).

In brief, the film finds absent-minded professor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) giving a teddy-bear-esque Mogwai (voiced by the mega-annoying Howie Mandell) to his son Billy (Zach Galligan) as a Christmas gift. The creature, which Billy names Gizmo, is just a widdle-biddle huggy-wuggy buggy with googly eyes and a lovely singing voice, but there are three caveats to caring for him: keep him out of sunlight, because sunlight will kill him (like Dracula!), never get him wet, and never, ever, ever feed him after midnight. Naturally, a visit from Cory Feldman leads to disaster. Feldman pours water on Gizmo, who consequently gives birth to a bunch of fuzzy back-babies. The nasty Gizmo-spawn then trick Billy into feeding them eleven-pounds of chicken after midnight, which causes them to mutate into scaly, sharp-toothed horrors with perverse senses of humor. Mayhem ensues.

Seeing Gremlins as an adult, I’m pretty shocked by the nastiness of the picture, especially considering how aggressively it was marketed towards kids. All that cutesy Gizmo crap notwithstanding, this is one gruesome kiddie flick. Don’t believe me? Well, how about Polly Holliday vaulting through a closed window on her chair lift? How about an attempt to murder a dog by stringing it up with Christmas lights? How about the numerous revolting ways the evil gremlins are dispatched, not the least of which is the pop-a-gremlin-in-the-microwave sequence? How about the truly awful story about how Phoebe Cates’s dad bought the farm when he got stuck in a chimney while playing Santa (a scene that the studio desperately tried to exorcize from the film)?

Gremlins is like an E.C. horror comic illustrated by Norman Rockwell, and like an E.C. comic, it does not spare the graphic violence just because it’s aimed at the kids. On a more self-reflexive level, the film makes mincemeat of classic Christmas movies (particularly Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), saccharine creature features like E.T. (directed by Steven Spielberg, who executive-produced Gremlins), and small town idealism. The people in the neighborhood are a rogue’s gallery of misanthropes: there’s Polly “Kiss my grits” Holliday as a truly rotten combination of Mr. Potter and the Wicked Witch of the West (she even threatens to “get” Billy’s dog!); the great Dick Miller as Billy’s xenophobic neighbor; Glynn Turman of “The Wire” as Billy’s science teacher, a sadist who gets off on jabbing a mogwai with a syringe; and Judge Reinhold as a generic douche who exits the film far too early (he had more scenes, but director Joe Dante cut them as a concession to Warner Brothers. The cuts guaranteed that Cates’s controversial monologue would remain in the picture). And if all of that isn’t enough to ruin the summer of any tyke, there’s the revelation that there isn’t any Santa Claus.

If any of this sounds like criticism, you don’t know me very well. In fact, I think I enjoy Gremlins a lot more as an adult than I did when I was a kid. The film’s gleeful sadism is balanced wonderfully with off-the-wall humor out of a Tex Avery cartoon, beautifully unrealistic sets, dreamy cinematography, and tons of fun references to the kinds of sci-fi and monster flicks that inspired Gremlins (Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet makes a memorable cameo, there are multiple references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.). There are Hollywood in-jokes guaranteed to delight movie geeks (a theater marquee displays the films A Boy’s Life and Watch the Skies… the original titles of Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, respectively). I also love the way the film plays with clichés and viewer expectations. When we are introduced to Phoebe Cates’s Kate Beringer, we expect her to be nothing more than the bland girl-next-door taxed with little more than standing by the hero and looking pretty, but she reveals a real feisty attitude and a genuine dark side. The Chinese shopkeeper that owns the mogwai (Keye Luke) is presented as a creepy— and possibly nefarious— foreigner, yet he proves to be the conscience of the film with some harsh but all-too-true parting words about his adopted country. Billy’s mom (Frances Lee McCain) may be my favorite character in the film. At first, she comes off as a June Cleaver stereotype, but when she realizes that the gremlins have taken over her home, she bumps them off as swiftly and inventively as Rambo.

And then there are the title critters. The gremlins are testaments to the power of three-dimensional monster props, which are so rarely used in this age of slick computer-generated special effects. The gremlins are marvelously executed, extremely articulate puppets, and watching them run rampant through Little Town U.S.A., impersonating Christmas carolers and film noir anti-heroes, and shooting each other with pistols is a blast. Gizmo is a bit insufferable, but he actually has a lot less screen time than I remembered. I’m also impressed by how timeless the film is; aside from its synthesizer-driven soundtrack and a brief break-dancing sequence, Gremlins barely feels like it was made in the ‘80s.

So, in conclusion: Gremlins? Yes, Gremlins!

Mike gives Gremlins… 1 Lake Huron!

Well, Jeffrey, I guess it took a mean-spirited movie to keep me from making mean-spirited comments.

Oh, wait a minute, I do have some mean-spirited comments! Way to cop out on your own web site, jackass! Before I know it, you’ll be asking me to shower for you.