When my parents brought home our first VCR as a kid, they rented two movies. The first, Disney’s “The Land Before Time,” (a sweet movie, back before Disney added Pixar to the end of their name), and the second, the 1986 horror film “Critters,” which scared the crap out of me back then. “Critters,” the first horror film I ever saw – a fitting review for our third annual horror month. While a ‘B’ movie by all rights, it holds up over the years as a somewhat-scary, if not iconic film that provides some scares, some laughs, and good entertainment.
“Critters” is not a movie based in reality, as it opens to an alien life-form known as ‘Crites’ who escape imprisonment and head to Earth to ‘feed.’ On their tail are a pair of faceless bounty hunters, one who takes on the visage of fictional ‘80s rocker Johnny Steele, and the other who impersonates a cop, a priest, and a town drunk before the movie’s over. However, these fantastical elements somehow work in a film that grounds itself in ‘80s pop culture and country-suburban Americana.
My first reaction while watching “Critters’” opening is ‘of course it takes place in Kansas.’ The film’s heroes, the Brown family, consist of Lee Brown (Billy Green Bush), father and farmer, who eats his breakfast against grease-stained overalls, his dutiful wife Helen (Dee Wallace), and two kids – the young and troublemaking Brad (Scott Grimes), and teenage April (Nadine Van der Velde). The Brown’s farm is something out of a country painting, where cats roam free and the milkman probably still delivers bottled milk to their door, even though this is 1980, not 1950. Helen reminds Lee to remember his bowling shirt for that night’s tournament. Something tells me the tournament is the most exciting day of this guy’s entire year. Other players, such as town Sherriff Harv (M. Emmett Walsh), and town drunk Charlie (Don Keith Opper), round out the small town portrait to a T.
While laughable, this all works to set up a peaceful dream you just know will turn into a nightmare by the end. But with character and scene development better than most modern horror, by the time that nightmare starts you actually care what happens to these simple folk. And it’s a credit to the film’s script, and limited budget of $2M, that when the Crites do strike, it isn’t over-the-top, but legitimately scary. Director Stephen Herek keeps the Critters mostly ensconced in dark, with noises and human injuries the only early signs of their presence. In one scene, Helen drops a plate as two glowing red eyes stare at her from outside a kitchen window. And when the Crites do attack, it’s with vicious bites and these horrible-looking quills that are somehow more terrifying than they should be.
This is what works about “Critters” – the slow build-up to the Crites arriving at the Brown’s farm, and the rural isolation that makes escape all but impossible. Add to one of the film’s targets April’s boyfriend Steve, played by a young Billy Zane, and you’ve got a horror flick on par with “Friday the 13th” or “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
However, the film suffers with the arrival of the bounty hunters, who are less content with finding the Crites as with decimating most of the town in the process, as well as the aliens growing in size, where the film’s antiquated special effects begin to fall apart. The unknown is simply more terrifying; and there’s something horrible about an alien creature the size of a badger hiding in the shadows that just isn’t there when it’s four-foot tall. Add to this subtitled curse words that appear in English as the Crites talk in their own language, and the film loses it’s macabre edge as it swings toward laughable.
“Critters” is not really a bad film; it just isn’t horribly authentic, although it really does try. The Americana slice-of-life it provides is wonderful, as are early scenes that instill the kind of fear and suspense a film like this needs to. It breaks down with lots of explosions and effects, where having the Browns overcome their own nightmare may have been more endearing. It spawned three sequels, all far worse than this one, and the film will still manage to send a shiver up your spine, if you let it. The same scenes that scared me as a kid are still creepy today. And the rest of it was kind of okay, too.
– by Mark Ziobro
