Concept: Cute turns into insane as creatures run amuck in a Christmas town.

• Picture a living Currier & Ives winter wonderland print, a lovely small-town snowscape populated by All-Americana people doing their small-town things at Christmas time. Until…a swarm of psychopathic, murderous creatures ravage the town and tear it apart. Surprise! It’s a horror movie!
• If you take a creepy clown and shrink it down to two feet, give it fangs, scales and lots of bloodthirst, multiply it by a thousand and then release them on an innocent populace who have no clue about what’s coming, you have the movie, “Gremlins.”
• This is probably the most twisted and violent PG movie ever produced. Think of it as Looney Tunes on a bad acid trip.
• What the movie essentially does is to take the standard Christmas movie and turn it completely upside down. This movie is, well, insane.
• Is it good? Yes, it’s good, if you like horror movies and nightmares, if you can appreciate both cute and madness. It doesn’t go over the line into tasteless, but it sometimes gets exceedingly close.
• You’d never think Disney would have allowed a clip from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to be used in a movie like this. When this movie came out, some heads in Disney must have rolled. 
• Those eighties. Such violence in the movies at the time. Such twistedness. “Gremlins” is the epitome of both.
• And surprisingly, the mechanical puppetry used for the cute gremlin “Gizmo” is just as amazing now in our digital, CGI-infested era as it was 32 years ago. It’s nothing short of incredible.
• It was as a result of the violence in this movie and Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” that the Motion Pictures Association of America decided to create a new rating of PG-13 to accommodate this greater level of violence without forcing a movie to be rated R.

Not For Kids