Undescribable Perfection

Too much of everything

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Looking back I cannot for the life of me remember how I got to see this movie. I know I first saw it when I was quite young but I'm surprised I was allowed to see it. Its really quite puzzling frankly. I'm guessing my dad (the sci-fi fan) may have let it pass as it was more of a silly sci-fi comedy horror rather than an all out nasty horror (bit like 'An American Werewolf in London') Anyway somehow I saw it...and became a relatively big fan of the franchise.Its amazing to think that this movies story was actually (apparently) written long before we got Joe Dante's 1984 classic 'Gremlins'. As with many movies that become influential classics there often follows a raft of copycats varying in quality. After its initial release Critters was widely regarded as such a copycat, albeit one of the best copycats. Alongside that you had other movies such as the 'Ghoulies' franchise, 'Munchies', 'Hobgoblin', 'Elves', 'Beasties', and maybe to a certain extent the 'Leprechaun' franchise. Despite that Critters plot was actually very different to Joe Dante's movie.The plot is your typical science-fiction hokum that could quite easily of come from the pages of a 1950's script. A prison in space (on an asteroid) houses a species of deadly creatures called Crites. The Crites manage to escape the prison and fly off towards Earth. The space prisons alien warden immediately hires two space bounty hunters to track down the Crites before they manage to feed (before midnight?). The Crites naturally make their merry way to Earth and touchdown right in the middle of rural America, because where else? Before you can say bon appétit the Crites are attacking everyone and everything in site.Now even though this movie is called 'Critters' and follows the little carnivorous creatures from A to B; technically you could call this movie 'Bounty Hunters' because essentially its more about their story than anything else. The Crites are merely a basic plot device to defeat, the human family in danger are merely there for the risk factor. The bounty hunters are the characters you get behind and cheer for because they are ice cool, quirky, funny, and the movie is always better with them in a scene. Hell most of the movie is simply following the bounty hunters as they search for the Crites. Once they find them they are able to eliminate the critters easily with their huge space guns, its just a matter of finding the little darlings.The bounty hunters are also shape-shifters (one called Ug, the other apparently nameless) with glowing green blobs for heads. They both literally have glowing green, featureless putty-like heads which effects wise actually works really nicely. We don't find out where they are from or anything about their backgrounds at tall. We don't even know what they actually look like in their original form. They are shape-shifters, they have an original form which we assume is the glowing green putty-like form. But then why do they always retain a human male form in general?It is the shape-shifting special effects sequence that wowed me as a child back in the day. When the bounty hunter begins to morph into his intended target (in this case a human male). Clearly the crew have made a full sized (?) human head out of different layers of wax or putty or plasticine or whatever. They have then slowly and carefully heated this head, presumably one stage at a time, so each layer can run and melt away to reveal the next layer underneath. Each layer obviously represents skin, muscle, blood, bone, tissue etc...Once this was completed they then ran the recording backwards as if all the layers were slowly growing or merging into place over the skull as the aliens head morphed. The trick is a simple one but extremely effective and memorable here as one of the cool gory moments.Ug is the main bounty hunter with the bulk of the dialog, he is the hero character basically. You can tell this because he chooses a human male rock star (the fictitious Johnny Steele) for his 'face' when they initially come to Earth. This means he's got that Mick Jagger type of look about him with flowing locks, a sexy voice, he's slim, and has high cheek bones. Whilst at the same time he has the cool calm serious demeanor of Clint Eastwood. You could say he's an anti-hero really because he's not exactly kind to humans initially. He's not bad or anything but he doesn't mollycoddle them, its only towards the end that he becomes more sensitive towards the humans. Johnny Steele: Power of the Night. The best fake band (and fake hit song) ever? I must also point out that the score and soundtrack for this movie are so delightfully 80's. If that's your bag then I highly recommend this. Go Google it now, now!!His partner on the other hand is a bit of a loose cannon with his space gun. This guy is kinda twitchy and won't hesitate to whip out his weapon and blow something away with no regard to any humans nearby. He also cannot decide on a face to transform into and is constantly changing throughout the movie. They are a slightly mismatched pair for sure with Ug being the more calm and level-head hunter. Still this doesn't stop the pair of them destroying a whole load of crap together, Ug certainly doesn't rein his partner in much.The Crites are (as I'm sure you are aware) little fuzzy rodent-like creatures with tiny arms and legs, glowing red eyes, and a large maw full of razor sharp teeth. They are basically hand and animatronic operated puppets depending on the scene and shot. They look pretty different from Joe Dante's Gremlins but the way in which they were created and shot are very similar. So in general you'll have scenes where a critter will be a fully animatronic puppet for a closeup on its face, and its effective. Then other scenes where the critter is operating something and you get a closeup of its little arm and claw, and its kinda basic lookin'. And then scenes where the critter is clearly a puppet or doll. When they curl up into furry balls and roll around (how they get around quickly), its a bit tacky looking.Alas the history and evolution of the Crites is not really explained well in this movie. Again like the bounty hunters we do not know where they come from, why they must eat all the time, how they can eat all the time being so small, why are they going to space prison? (guessing they ate someone or something). They are clearly intelligent creatures with emotions and thought because they can speak to each other, they fear things, they can be happy, and they can fly spaceships. But they also appear to be inherently evil towards anything...if they can eat it, they don't care. It is also shown that the Crites can grow to enormous sizes when they carry on eating, but this only happens to one of them, why not all? This rather large Crite also kidnaps the young female towards the finale, but why?? Were they gonna use her as a hostage? Use her for food? Breed with her?? Who knows.The humans in peril are of course you're typical all-American rural types, not rednecks but just good honest country folk. They live on a very nice picturesque farm with a white picket fence and a large well presented house. The father (Billy Bush) has a very strong southern accent, he's firm and seemingly a good man. Whilst the mother (a very gorgeous looking Dee Wallace) is very much a 50's looking type of house wife and offers up some more classic scream queen type antics. Their daughter (Nadine Van der Velde) is also seemingly a good girl, very attractive, and is seeing a rather well-to-do flashy young jock with a cringeworthy ponytail and Porsche (a very young Billy Zane). And then we have their son Brad (Scott Grimes) who seems completely unrelated being ginger, looks a bit like a young girl if you ask me, and has an obsession with making homemade...explosives?! Foreshadowing tip, the explosives will obviously come in handy.This just leaves old Charlie (Don Keith Opper) who is the stereotypical town drunk and conspiracy nutjob. This guy clearly spends most of his time getting pissed and shouting his mouth off about all sorts of conspiracies surrounding aliens and the government etc...We first meet Charlie in the local jail (the drunk tank) sleeping off his last bender. He's a scrawny goofy looking guy who is kind gentle and helpful. In this movie he kinda plays Brad's sidekick and second and third fiddle to both the bounty hunters and the rest of the family. Opper does get a more meaty part when Ug's bounty hunter partner transforms into Charlies visage, but other than that the character of Charlie does very little really. And yet this character goes on to become this franchises main protagonist, which is odd.End of the day what do you have here? A movie about little alien furry balls with sharp teeth that eat pretty much anything. Its all set in a small American as apple pie hick town complete with a local drunk and a tobacco chewing, aging, balding, fat Sheriff (M. Emmet Walsh). You can't really get much more cliched and cornball than that. Its clear to see this movie didn't have a great deal of money to work with, but its also clear they made every penny count. This was an early New Line Cinema B-movie release that was pretty blatantly trying to ride the coattails of a larger A-movie, but quite surprisingly had enough of its own ideas to stand on its own. Yes those ideas weren't exactly fresh (now or then) but the super creativity in effects along with other simple quirky visuals really helped this to stand out in the crowd. Oh and that special button that somehow magically rebuilt the farmhouse right at the end, how the flip does that work??7/10

Boy, Critters. Where do I began with this film.The story is pretty much a bunch of Carnivore, furry Hedgehog/Porcupine mixed extraterrestrial Creatures called Crites or Critters have escaped from their outer space prison, and made it their way to the other side of the Galaxy to land on the life planet "Earth" to search for food, while a couple Bounty Hunters are sent to go find them and exterminate them. Meanwhile, at the location of a farm outside of a small Kansas Town, the family is then under attack by the Man-eating Critters as it where they landed on, and tries anyways to protect themselves and attempts to killed every single one of these vicious freaks. This movie have a good cast of people, the most notable one being Scott Grimes, who portray the Red-headed kid in the film, who you may recognize being one of Seth MacFarlane buddies as he cast in several of his work such as "Family Guy" and "American Dad", as well MacFarlane most recent live-action show "The Orville". My favorite characters are Grimes' Character, the Bounty Hunters, and a character named Charlie, who is pretty much a main character within the whole film series. Grimes' character was sorta entertaining to watch, he was quite funny and very serious at times. Charlie was good in this too, as his personality was just great being pretty much the Town's Drunk, and for the most time Loser, as he doesn't have any friends except for Grimes, whose their Relationship in this film was sorta nice to see, just a classic Buddy relationship, and his belief in the Extraterrestrial makes his character more outstanding. The Bounty Hunters were like the second highlights of the film, they were so cool to see, and let don't forget the awesome transformation scene, like wow, that shows the special effects that was used for this were so incredible and this was before CGI. The effects on the Critters were good too, which are another thing I should talk about as well, the Critters, they were feisty in this one, like how they comes after these family members is very terrific and we feel how horrifying this family was in this one. They were slightly a-bit funny to watch in this as well, like their Interactions is sorta interesting, but really it not that much to be honest. Speaking of Interactions, I shall one of the two complaints this film delivers, one is that the Critters didn't have that much of Interactions with the Bounty Hunters, which is something I never really liked, instead through-out the whole until close by the end, the Bounty Hunters spend their time searching through-out the Town trying to find the Critters, now it funny of them getting into others' businesses, really were just trying to find who their looking for, but I just wished they added a few more scenes of them with the Critters. The other complaint is that the death rate is very VERY low, there only like two people killed in this one, which is actually consequentially the total amount of deaths in these films (Only by the Critters anyways), except for Critters 2. That not really why I have a problem with however, it just that only one death was shown on-screen and the other one happened underneath a car, which come on, really. But those doesn't boiled this film down exactly, it stills an entertaining piece of art with some great horror going on. Anyways, if you want to see a horror film with a classic B-Movie feel to it, and if you loved Gremlins (Which this film is competing with), you'll definitely loves this one.

Jay and Helen Brown (Dee Wallace) live on their rural farm with their son Brad and teen daughter April. The town is invade by space critters which escaped from intergalactic prison. They are pursued by two space bounty hunters who took the shape of band members from a music video. Brad has an older friend in Charlie McFadden. April has boyfriend Steve (Billy Zane). Harv (M. Emmet Walsh) is the sheriff.I really love critters, the space creatures. I also like the space bounty hunters. This is strictly B-movie with B-movie acting and story. It does have some notable performers but they're not asked to do great work. It's just fun to have these critters rolling around.

Talk about 80s. Perhaps my first time seeing Critters should've been back then.I have seen Critters 3 when was young, but then it was only because I was into Leonard DiCaprio at the time. (Actually, admittedly, I still am.) I just never got around to this, Part 2, 4 or whatever how many more they made that I have even less interest in.This original film (meaning, #1 in the series) dealt with fur balls from hell – uh, space – and their need to chop everything with their piranha teeth. They crash land in Smallville, U.S.A. on the most cliché family farm in movie history. I.E. Dad wears overalls all-day and drinks from a jar. (Even his real name is "Billy.")In normal 80s fashion, the family fights off the rolling little balls of Satan while two emotionless, direct from a bad 80s music video, bounty hunters aid.Despite me never seeing this before and it's been just shy of 30 years since its initial release, it holds up for me because it's 100% 80s horror/comedy fair. Even if you've never seen it, but love the 80s horror movies, you might like this little gem.* * * Final thoughts: I know they were trying to tap into Gremlins success, just like every other 80s horror film was a copycat, but at least this movie tried to shake things up a bit with the background story. Sadly, that entire (and basically, right off the set of the 1970's TV program: Wonder Woman) sci-fi opening was truly hard to get through.