Gremlins 1984
This is another "classic" 80's movie that I never watched originally. It seems like there were a lot of movies with kind of lifelike puppets that didn't really work, like E.T., Yoda, etc. I was able to get a 4k digital version of this movie using Microsoft points after being surprised at how good the critical scores were. I think there is a lot of nostaglia at work for what was probably a lot of people's first horror movie. Despite the cute and fuzzy Gizmo, there is a more murderous batch of gremlins that drive the movie. The puppets keep the action from really succeeding and there isn't any kind of character development going on with the human characters. That leaves comedy which is kind of okay, but relies too much on cute gags from the misbehaving gremlins along with darkly comic attacks on humans and gremlins. There is a message spelled out at the end about humans being unable to be responsible for anything in nature, but that voice of reason is never present from any of the characters in the movie who quickly violate the three laws of gremlins repeatedly. It is still easy to watch, but is one of those movies that you keep watching despite knowing it is bad and won't get any better. The 4k rendering of the movie is not detectable in a movie that is intentionally blurry to make the puppets more realistic
Written: 02 Nov 2025
Owned on: Digital