A horde of fuzzy, little balls, with razor-sharp teeth, descend upon a small rural town, eating everything and everyone they meet. With the Brown family trapped in their home, things only get worse when intergalactic bounty hunters land.
Among killer hand-puppet films, Critters is one of the best. You didn’t even know there was a category of killer hand-puppet films? You have so much to learn (and you’ve missed so many bad movies). Following Gremlins, screens (and more often, video stores) were inundated by cute, cheaply made, toothy monsters. They came from outer space, from demonic realms, and from the far reaches of the Earth. Most are horrible, but the fuzzball crites (or is it Krites?) are entertaining enough for a few hours.
After a reasonable low-budget opening at a deep space penal colony, Critters slows to a crawl as we are introduced to people who are either unpleasant or uninteresting. Dee Wallace-Stone, who must have an agreement that she gets first crack at all genre moms, is fine as Mrs. Brown, but the rest of the family I could have done without. Brad Brown (Scott Grimes) is a rotten, disobedient child, which would be fine if he was disobedient in an entertaining way. The father is a standard bumpkin, and the daughter has no personality except that she likes boys. All of them are better than the mentally challenged, drunken handyman. Add in horrible ’80s pop-rock, and I thought I was in for a rough ride. But things change once the aliens show up. The crites chew up a few people while the bounty hunters supply comedy by shape-changing into everyone they meet and using guns about ten times more destructive than they need.
Critters, once it gets started, is a remedy to the saccharin poison of films like E.T. Unfortunately, it pulls its punches. It should have been double-barreled nasty, but it plays it too close to the films it is parodying, letting a child be the hero, killing few (and no one important), and keeping blood to a minimum. Still, you just have to like those hand-puppets.
It was followed by Critter 2: The Main Course, Critter 3, and Critters 4.