See Everything Wrong With Gremlins
Every year, there is much debate about what makes a good Christmas movie. Movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation are obviously great choices. However, some might argue that movies like Die Hard and Gremlins are not Christmas movies, even though they take place during the Christmas season.
I thoroughly disagree with this argument. Gremlins promotes family unity, togetherness, and personal responsibility during the Christmas season while also injecting terrible, terrible trouble-making Mogwais.
In the spirit of the season, the people at CinemaSins created an “Everything Wrong With Gremlins in Roughly Eight Minutes” video. The biggest thing that I never noticed from Gremlins is that the back lot set of Kingston Falls is the exact same one used as Hill Valley in Back to the Future. This blew my mind.
Check out everything wrong with Gremlins.
Another fun Gremlins fact: the titles on the movie marquee are the working titles for E.T. (A Boy’s Life) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Watch the Skies). Steven Spielberg has a penchant for putting fake movie titles in films he produces. Jaws 19 was in Back to the Future Part II. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s King Lear and Jack and the Beanstalks — starring Robin Williams — turned up in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
The ending of Gremlins also reminds me of the ending of Inglourious Basterds, with both using a movie theater to trap and blow up the Gremlins/Nazis.
Gremlins and plenty of other beloved movies have their fair share of problems, but good directors like Joe Dante can distract from those mistakes with high action and good storytelling. There’s no such thing as a perfect movie, but there are a few out there, like Gremlins, that come pretty damn close.
So is Gremlins a Christmas movie? Of course it is. Even with its flaws, this is still a must-watch every season.
