Tow Truck Face (Gremlins 2 Bonus Episode)

Hello, friends of DeSoto, listening into the main feed of the greatest generation.

This is a bonus episode.

We make a bonus episode every month for people that support our show at maximumfun.org slash join.

But it's the holiday season.

Adam and I were in a giving mood.

We thought we'd make this one free.

So check it out.

It's a very special bonus episode about Gremlins 2, the new batch.

A conversation Ben and I really enjoyed having.

It's a bunch of fun, and it's for everyone this time.

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And they're all about gremlins too.

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Here's to the finest crew in starving.

When it comes to my crew, you won't get any arguments from me.

Welcome to a bonus episode of The Greatest Generation.

It's a Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys just a little bit embarrassed about having a Star Trek podcast.

Making bonus episodes every month, thanks to the folks who support the show every month.

I'm Adam Pranica.

I'm Ben Harrison.

Thank you, folks who support the show every month.

Yeah, here's what you get.

You're about to unwrap a box of Gremlins 2.

We figured two white dudes had not gotten together and talked about gremlins 2 on podcasts enough, so we would do it too.

I'm not aware of any others that have done it, Ben.

You listen to more shows than I do.

No, that's what I'm saying.

Nobody else has done this before.

I think we're going to be the first

culture chat podcast to cover Gremlins 2, the new batch.

And I'm really excited about it.

What's your relationship with this movie?

Because you have a very special annual relationship with

the first in this series.

You watch it every year around the holidays to get in the holiday mayhem mood.

It's true.

I make a tomato bisque.

I make a delicious grilled cheese sandwich out of artisan bread.

I watch gremlins.

This is what we do in our household.

What kind of cheese are you putting on that?

Oh,

a mix of American and sharp cheddar.

Oh, yeah.

I get them both in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know I'm slopping it up with both kinds of cheeses.

It's the best.

Love it.

I prefer the rosemary Diamante loaf that you can get in the Seattle area grocery stores.

Those are those ones that are like freeze-dried or they're like vacuum-packed or something, right?

I mean, you can get get them that way if you don't live in the Seattle area, but boy, oh boy, you can occasionally get a warm loaf

in the rack of a grocery store, and it feels great to get one of those.

I'm going to be up there for the holidays.

I'm going to be getting a couple of warm loaves

this year.

It's going to be great.

Did you do the same for Gremlins 2?

Do you do the same for Gremlins 2?

Is it in your rotation at all?

Gremlins 2 doesn't catch my eye when I am booting up the streaming service and doing the movie search, and you get the original and the sequel to pop up as a search result.

I never consider it.

I haven't seen this movie in 20 years.

Is it

because Phoebe Cates changed her hair in between movies?

Is that why?

I think Phoebe Cates remains as attractive as ever, movie to movie, and I dug the haircut in both.

All right.

I'm tossing out

options for why this may be.

I'm curious.

You know what?

I think the reason might be the absence of Hoyt Axton,

really the backbone of the first movie.

There are so many differences between this film and the first, and it's a vibe, I think, mostly.

I think we can get into a lot of these

observations as we discuss the film, Ben.

You want to just hop right in?

Let's see if this is a hot loaf.

Gremlins 2, the new batch,

the Randall Peltzer free sequel to Gremlins 1.

First one was a classic.

This should be pretty straightforward.

Ben, we're running it back, this movie.

Joe Dante brought back Zach Gilligan, Phoebe Cates,

about a thousand cameos.

Joe Dante on record not wanting to make a sequel.

he thought the first film stood on its own, and then the studio started going down the road of sequel creation, and they had a bunch of weird ideas,

ideas that Dante didn't want to be a part of.

Finally, they just threw a bunch of cash at him and a bunch of creative control, and those things together got him in the director's chair in a movie that Joe Dante himself

has said is the most directorial and creative power he's ever had.

So every single choice here, I think you could draw a line from him to it.

It's a movie with a unique vision, I'll tell you that.

We open with a Chuck Jones-directed Looney Tunes gag where the Warner Brothers logo gets fought over by Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.

I think it's easy to kind of,

I don't know, like not care about this as just sort of a tack on.

Yeah.

But I think this,

this and the other moments that give us some Warner Bros.

Looney Tune stuff, I think grounds us in that kind of vibe, right?

I mean, it winds up being a fake out.

Like it's sort of presented as you're about to see the short cartoon before the feature presentation, which used to be a thing in movies.

And I feel like by the time I was a kid going to movies, it was like a quaint throwback when they did that.

And Pixar is probably the only studio that still puts any effort into making short films at all.

Sure, but while the Warner Brothers cartoons are

zany and funny and weird, you go to a Pixar film and it's like three five-minute films about kids whose parents are dying or have died or whatever.

Yeah.

The vibes are different.

The vibes are different.

This winds up being a fake out.

We do not get a Looney Tunes cartoon.

It's an, oh, fuck it.

Let's just watch the thing you came here to see.

And we are flying in fast motion into New York City.

How does this feel flying through the buildings of the New York City skyline in

the early 90s?

Exhilarating.

Yeah, yeah.

Remember when you could do that?

You could see the picture chopper doing just about anything.

in this flyby.

Yeah.

Yeah, no one's even giving it a second look.

We find our way to Chinatown, where a limousine piloted by a driver that really needs to take a defensive driving course pulls up in front of a shop.

This is Mr.

Wing's shop from the first film.

And Robert Picardo gets out of the

limo

wearing a tribble on his head.

And he and his goons push a

middle school TV cart style television into Mr.

Wing's shop so that Daniel Clamp can directly address Mr.

Wing without having to like sully himself by going and being there in person.

We were recently talking about how at the end of the third season of Star Trek Picard, maybe

that bridge just got busted up with sledgehammers and thrown in the trash.

Maybe it's preserved.

No one seems to give a shit about these props and locations.

There's been six years between the original Gremlins and this film, and Mr.

Wing's shop

is the same as it was before.

I'm assuming it was just kept in storage.

Like, it is perfect.

I mean, like, when you're dressing a set, you do take a lot of...

photographs so that you make sure you know when you reset a shot everything is where it should be um

So, it could be that they recreated it from the first film, but I like to think that Mr.

Wing was just operating the shop for six years.

I think it's interesting that this is the

this is really the only nostalgic location we get in the film.

Everything from here is brand new.

We're not going back to Billy's house, or we're not going back to Kingston Falls, or any of those other places, but this

grounds us in that universe.

It told me that the people making this movie had some respect for the original by going back here.

I thought it was a good way to begin.

So the idea is that Daniel Clamp, a real estate mogul, is trying to develop the Clamp Chinatown Center.

And he's trying to buy up a bunch of real estate in order to bulldoze it and erect this new monument to 80s greed, I guess.

It sounds like a Delta City type plan from RoboCop, right?

Yeah, very much so.

There are so many RoboCop vibes.

Yeah.

I mean, in the building itself that we spend most of the movie in, and

just in the way Clamp operates.

If you told me that Paul Verhoeven was involved in this film, I think I would believe it.

Absent the nudity that you know would be present.

Right.

Girl Gremlin would get her tits out in a Verhoeven-inflected version of this film.

Yeah, so Mr.

Wing is like the last holdout on the block.

He won't budge.

He won't accept any amount of money to replace his shop.

I love the way Mr.

Wing is.

Like, Mr.

Wing is the smartest person in the room, in any room that he's in.

And when this fucking guy comes in to give him the pitch, like the things that he says under his breath or directly to the Robert Picardo character is so cutting and good.

And his intelligence like kind of permits him to do this without

the offense that you would expect to happen in a moment like this.

So, yeah, I mean, they're talking like this guy,

he's old and dusty.

He's a smoker.

We can just wait him out.

Like, we have time.

He's an antique.

We can wait.

But we also come to understand that

Gizmo, our beloved Magwai from the previous film,

remains in Mr.

Wings' care and is living here in the shop in a little cage.

I was missing the grandson in this scene.

As maybe the surrogates, maybe just someone who's around.

I mean, it's been many years.

You could guess that he's probably off

at college or maybe his own, like living his own life with his own family or something.

But I think it's crucial that there's no one there having Mr.

Wings back in this moment because when he dies six weeks later, there doesn't seem to be anyone whose job it is to be a steward of what remains of his business or any of the contents of the building, you know?

Because the excavator is there just ripping the building down and Gizmo is still in there.

Yeah, he has to escape being crushed by a bucket loader.

Like,

the candles are still lit.

What a miracle.

Maybe that makes the case for this being a Hanukkah movie because there's a candle-based miracle.

Amazing.

Yeah.

Gizmo barely escapes with his life, and it's the first scene where you get the sense that the effects are going to be a little bit different than the ones in the first film.

Gizmo not seen walking around very much at all in the first film.

And here you get kind of

a wider shot of him out on a sidewalk waddling around with his big old barrel belly.

Pretty well done shot, like

some kind of blue screen comp or something.

I'm not sure, I'm not sure how you do it with a little puppet like this

and get the matting as good as it looks.

But yeah, it seems like he is immediately down shifting into a hobo-based lifestyle

when he is immediately snatched up by a guy who has come downtown to look for something weird.

And I immediately recognize this guy as

the

jail guard from Terminator 2.

Right, the guy who licks.

Or the brother of the guy who licks?

Sure.

We cannot be sure which of these twin brothers was the one doing the licking, but if you're in the city looking for something specific, odds are you're going to find it.

And this guy has.

He's looking for something and he's he's licking for something.

Family with glasses who can talk and say New York, New York.

That's brilliant.

It's in the movie done.

We cut uptown to Billy and Kate, a couple trying to make it together in the big city.

They're on their way to work and they work at the headquarters of Clamps, you know, multifaceted empire.

It was breathtaking to get this establishing shot.

Like, we're in New York City.

New York City.

With characters we're used to seeing like on a studio backlot

with fake snow.

Like the size that the universe has has grown to with these characters that we're so familiar with in a much tinier place.

It took some getting used to for me, honestly.

Totally.

So we learned pretty quickly that Billy is a like a concept artist, artist, maybe.

He's no longer in finance, no longer a banker.

He's now using

his really impressive skills as a scenic illustrator to make a like an artist rendering of what the Chinatown center that Clamp wants to build might look like.

He's got a boss, a fast-talking career gal named Marla, who is chain-smoking her way through,

you know, busting his nuts

around the office.

Also, busting nuts is Robert Bicardo, who comes by and like inspects Billy's desk and finds that he has an unsanctioned potted plant and an illustration of his hometown taped up to the inside of his cubicle.

This is the sort of environment where it's rules for rules' sake and those that enforce those rules

walking around.

And poor Billy, I mean, he goes from one shitty workplace to another.

Felt bad for him.

It's tough out there.

To

give us an example of just how draconian this workplace can be, we get the inside of the the security apparatus in this office building and the Picardo character is able to use its its vast camera system to capture a rule-breaking smoker.

He's gone to steal a smoke

and is able to fire him on the spot via intercom.

In a scene that also tells us just how efficiently this place runs, because as soon as he's fired, there's a message on the PA system that goes, like, we're now hiring in that other guy's area.

This guy should have just taken a page from Marla's playbook and smoke at work.

Yeah.

Don't take a break for it.

Just keep blowing that butt while you work.

The smoking in the workplace is striking throughout this film.

Kate is a tour guide in the building, which is not just an office tower, but also has like sort of a shopping mall area in it and is a tourist attraction.

And tour guides talk about all of the great stuff that goes on here, including the cable network operated by Mr.

Clamp.

And

we cut up to that cable network where this old Dracula dude is

doing like the midnight movie kind of show.

Yeah.

Where he like introduces the creature feature that you're going to get to watch.

The attack of the octopus people.

That's tonight's movie.

And boy, is it scary.

The tour guides are so important

in this movie because they convey all the information we need to understand how this facility operates.

They are a real shortcut to our understanding.

Tour guides are the exposition characters of real life.

Yeah.

So it doesn't break a movie to just have one in there.

Yeah.

You know?

It's really true.

There are some obvious areas you would expect

an office building to contain.

Like there's areas where you can order food or drinks or whatever.

There's

gift shops.

There's the offices and the cubicles, obviously, but there's also a genetic modification and animal testing center.

Sure, gotta have one of those.

You don't often find one of those, and uh, wouldn't you know it, a Christopher Lee runs this lab.

Just the exact sort of casting you want to convey very quickly that this isn't the sort of place where the welfare of the animals is a top priority.

What procedure do you propose to adopt?

Sales samples tomorrow, tissue cultures Thursday.

And of course, there's body structure.

And for that, my little friend,

we'll just have to cut you.

It's very much a med scientist operation that they have going there.

Unclear what the business model of it is.

It just seems to be kind of like general sicko inventor shit going on.

Like RD, just general RD.

Let's see what we can do with this stuff.

The twin brothers who discovered the Magwai earlier are employed there.

And

the guy that played Ding Chavez in Clear and Present Danger is like a delivery dude.

And he's dropping off some bottled disease for Christopher Lee to enjoy having his hands on.

Yeah, there's a lethality to this actor that I always...

assume

could not take my eyes off him.

Raymond Cruz has played so many scary badasses of one kind or another over the years that delivery guy just, it's going to turn out he's like a mild-mannered delivery guy by day, but a CIA assassin by night or something.

You're just speaking for me.

Like I ain't got the goddamn sense to speak for myself.

I assumed he was overqualified for this job.

So many of the characters at this point already in the movie seem like they're being set up to do some incredible violence toward the end.

Like Christopher Lee always feels like that.

Yeah.

Dink Javez always feels like that.

The Robert Picardo character feels like he is pitched as being so over-the-top evil, like the pointy end of the stick for the rich man at the top of the building, that there's going to be some kind of like

ironic comeuppance for all of the like harm he's inflicted over the years for this character at some point.

Or he is going to like, you know, turn a corner and save the day and like start mowing down gremlins at some point when things inevitably go bad.

I'm so excited for these three guys to just go absolutely buck fucking wild toward the end of this movie now that their characters have been established.

Can't you understand the darkness of Christopher Lee's character?

When you are named Dr.

Catheter, I think what you do is you reject a career in the standard medical community and you go

break off into animal testing.

Right.

You probably just get teased too much if you work at a regular hospital.

Oh, come on.

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine being Mr.

Catheter, someone who never had any medical training and how difficult that was?

Oh.

His father must have been miserable.

Is it just like a nickname that he picked up in mad scientist school because like that was just an area he really excelled in?

People thought that was funny.

I mean, that's a nicer story to tell than someone who actually has the last name Catheter.

That's his surname legally.

Yeah.

So, yeah,

we get the twins from T2.

They're showing him various things they got going on, and they show him Gizmo.

They're very, you know, interested in this uncommon creature that they've discovered.

It feels like a very Ghostbusters 2 type scene where they play the music and Gizmo dances.

Yeah.

In the same way that,

like, Winston and Ray start yelling at the toaster and it starts bopping around in that scene.

Yeah.

A little dance number from Gizmo.

This is another scene where I'm like, damn, Gizmo.

Like, Gizmo's looking large.

You know what I mean?

He looks like he's about to have puppies.

He's got a little bit of a belly on him.

Yeah.

Maybe Mr.

Wing was like giving him sips of beer ever since he went back to the shop.

It's important that your pets get fed the right amount of food.

Otherwise, they can grow in an unhealthy way.

Billy's dad is not in this movie, but I feel like his spirit is very much in this movie.

We cut to Billy's cubicle, and we've come to understand over the course of this that there's lots of high-tech stuff going on in this building.

Elevators are voice operated.

There's all this surveillance state stuff going on in the security room, and there's like video phones in every cubicle.

Yeah.

And the lights are motion activated.

It's very Peltzer.

There are so many casting carryovers from the first film.

You saying that reminds me that the voices of the elevators and the building itself are also from that first movie.

Oh, whoa.

The familiarity is all around us in this building.

Speaking of familiar sounds, Billy overhears Dink Chavez whistling the tune that Gizmo the Magwai hums to himself when

he's hanging out.

He's like, Man, where'd you hear that?

And he's like, Oh, yeah, that genetic research facility that is also here for some reason.

And thinking fast, Billy grabs himself a toolbox and heads down there and

presents as like some kind of like maintenance tech that's going into the lab.

And immediately, you know, he like sees this horrific laboratory and everything that they've got going on in it.

And he grabs Gizmo and sneaks him out to a men's room where he turns down the light, and these two old buddies reconnect.

I was shocked that this movie did not choose the obvious

laugh, which was Billy taking Gizmo into a bathroom stall and talking to him, and someone outside listening to Billy

say words out of of context.

Right.

Who does number two work for?

That's right, buddy.

You show that turd who's boss.

Nice restraint is what I'm trying to say by Gremlins 2.

A movie about restraints, I think.

Yeah, sure.

It's about holding back,

just putting into the scene the bare minimum that it needs and

let it kind of breathe.

make the case for itself.

The thing that made me laugh the hardest in this scene was the way the automated building voiceover announced that this was the men's room.

This happens so often and the voice seems to be contextualized to circumstance too and we get that a little bit later.

Yeah.

But I kind of like this.

I don't want the same attitude in every place.

Like there's an environment you can create just by doing things like this, which is great.

Yeah.

I do not think it's a great decision by Billy to

take Gizmo to the bathroom and then, from there, take him to his cubicle and store him in a drawer.

That seems to be the dumbest choice he could possibly make.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like a good idea.

Yeah, he puts him in this drawer, and

no sooner has he done that than Mr.

Clamp himself kind of pulls a surprise inspection of the creative services division of his company, and he's kind of walking around gladhanding,

Marla is very thirstily trying to curry favor with the boss, and

he kind of wanders over to Billy's desk, which is conveniently immaculate of house plants or drawings of his hometown.

All he's got there is the drawing of the Chinatown center that Mr.

Clamp wants to build.

He loves Billy's drawing.

This is very exciting.

This moment felt so cruelly familiar to me.

You know, when you work in a creative department in a larger corporation, you'll sometimes get this executive walkthrough.

Yeah.

And it is so fucking condescending.

The vibe you get from the executive class toward the creative class.

And a, oh, look at these guys.

doing the cute work, you know?

Right.

Like that is threaded throughout the feels of this scene in a way that just made my skin crawl.

In a way that made me feel like the person who wrote this scene knows what that feels like.

Knows that the awful feeling.

Because there's like, there's so little respect for it.

Like, I would be when I was like editing in the ad industry back in the day, like you would like have someone like come by and want to see what you were working on.

And you're like, I'm in the middle of something, man.

Like, there's nothing for me to show you here.

yeah and they'd be like well just play it anyways like thus demonstrating how little they know about the process at all yeah like i like i don't know what the fuck you do but like if you were like making an excel chart or whatever like and weren't done with it would would you want to show someone you know yeah

fortunately billy has like basically finished work to show off in his cubicle.

So it makes a great impression.

Marla thinks that Billy might be be her ticket to the big time now that Mr.

Clamp has taken a shine to him.

So she wants to have a business dinner with potentially some sex on the side to talk about the way they could rise through the ranks together if

they could get it together to link up.

So much about the first movie is about being locked in time, right?

You know exactly what time it is.

You know exactly what time it should be if that clock radio has been disconnected from the wall.

Like it's ever present.

This is the first time in the film I felt totally ungrounded in that kind of time.

And I think part of it is like when you work in an office building, that's intentional.

But another part of it is like, like I was just confused throughout.

about what time of day this was because it seems like Marla and Billy go to dinner from here.

And in my mind, I'm like, Billy just got to work.

There hasn't even been lunch.

You can't just cancel lunch.

You just can't, guys.

Is this like farmer terminology?

Is this like supper or dinner happening around lunchtime?

Oh, yeah.

In a confusing way?

In 1990, things were a little bit more quaint.

Yeah, it seems that way.

But I mean, good for Billy getting a break from work, regardless of the reason.

Indeed.

So

Gizmo's got to to stay put.

He can't come on the date.

Billy goes and catches up with Kate and he's like, hey, so I know we had plans tonight, but I got to do this thing for work.

But I found Gizmo the Magwai, and you need to go grab him from my office and take him back to our apartment.

She is very freaked out by this.

She does not want to get back into all of the hijinks of the last movie.

He tries to calm her down.

Like, we know the rules.

It will be especially easy to follow them now that we know the consequences of disobeying them.

It's going to be fine.

It's another scene that had it been directed by Verhoeven, would have occurred like in the shower area of the office, which is depicted in the soft background.

Yeah.

Why is Billy allowed in here?

Just like a dozen female office workers soaping up each other's tits and Billy just trying to have a conversation with his lady friend.

I'm from Europe.

We just don't make such a big deal about these things over there.

We soap and the titsen.

It's the European way.

So, yeah, they are talking about the rules right as a...

custodian who is like muttering under his breath about how disgusting capitalism is,

wrenches on a water fountain and a bunch of, after a bunch of near misses,

Gizmo, of course, gets water sprayed on him and a whole bunch of Maguai pop out of his back.

A next generation of Maguai, if you will.

It doesn't have to be as Rube Goldbergian as it is.

Like this

water fountain spray goes up and then down to the drafting table and then through a little slot and then down another thing and then like it's all over the place.

Yeah, that's Joe Dante being like, I have creative control, isn't it?

Pretty fun.

Yeah.

Is this the end of the Rube Goldberg era of Hollywood though?

What a way to go out.

Is this on Open Pike Night that we were talking about the Rube Goldberg era of

Hollywood where there was just everybody had a machine like this?

I think we were talking about it on the hit movie podcast within a new Star Trek podcast, Greatest Trek, when we had Aaron Walkie on and we were talking about Goonies.

That's right.

Yeah.

It's kind of a, it's going out with a whimper, not with a bang, right?

Oh, really?

I don't know.

I liked it.

Anyways, these new Magwai are not nice kind like Gizmo, and they immediately present as bullies.

They shove him into a ventilation shaft.

Kate comes in and finds a cuter, one on the cuter end of the spectrum,

up to no good on top of a model of the building.

And I guess she has like face gremlin face blindness or something because she assumes that this is Gizmo and goes ahead and takes him home.

How rare do you think it is to have a

kind, well-adjusted, quote-unquote, quote, normal Magwai, given the proportion of absolute dirts that

come out of Gizmo every time he's exposed to water.

It seems like the hit rate on good and bad

is very poor.

Is Gizmo getting genetic contributions from elsewhere for these offspring?

Because

I think he needs to

kind of reconsider who he's dating, if that is the case.

I don't know.

This derpy Magwai plays a great role throughout.

Sure does.

He also seems to be the inspiration for the fucking cars character that's the tow truck.

Yeah, sure.

Voiced by Larry the cable guy.

Like, he's got

tow truck face.

You know?

He really does.

Whoa, whoa, you said that nothing was fire.

That was before I heard the words brainy and gremlin in the same sentence together.

The Magwai start to kind of make their way out into the building, and we cut over to a Canada-themed restaurant that Billy and Marla have gone out to.

How bad do you want to go to this restaurant?

It looked so fucking good.

It looked cool.

I want to drink out of a log.

Yeah.

Like, Billy has basically the stump of a tree.

It's a beer stein.

Is he drinking jolt out of that?

I think Marla's drinking jolt and he's having like labats or molson or something.

I think it gets name-checked by the mountie that's serving them.

You want another son, eh?

Uh, no, thanks, really.

I'm fine.

A lot of product placement in this movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Funny product placement, too.

Like, yeah.

Jolt Cola.

Hadn't thought about that in a long time.

I would love to go to this restaurant.

I'd love to drink out of big stumps.

I'd love to eat a chocolate mousse.

Yeah.

Literally.

There's that bar that we've gone to a couple of times in Seattle that's like

it's like Swiss mountain chalet themed, but like in sort of a through like a tiki lens almost.

We went there after our Neptune show one time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's called like the Mountaineering Club or something.

And that's, that was like, I feel like the closest thing I've ever been to, to a super duper Canada-themed restaurant like this.

A treasured memory always, the night after a show, going to a place that you think is going to serve food until late, and turns out they don't.

And so you're outside on a patio and it's 40 degrees and you're drinking a cocktail and going to bed without dinner later.

It's really cool what's happened to the hospitality industry lately.

Yeah, kids don't go into podcasting.

So yeah, Billy and Marla talk about the way art and business could really link up and go and go big places.

But Billy's, you know, he's spoken for.

He's got a fiancé.

He doesn't really want his boss's foot caressing his penis through his jeans.

Boy, she really rams it in there, huh?

When art and business join forces, anything can happen.

Oh, well, I definitely feel that we shouldn't join

forces.

Another thing that I always wonder about.

We don't like soliciting correspondence usually because we're scared of it.

Because we're cowards.

Speak for yourself.

You're a coward.

Just admit it.

I'm too dead inside to be a coward ben speak for yourself has anybody ever done this oh absolutely the stockinged foot on the penis haven't you had it done to you no i've i've both had it done to me and done it to other people to penises it was a it was a crazy time wow what were the 90s like cut over to uh where billy and kate live This was, I thought,

inspired by Billy's mom's kitchen with all the yellow in there.

At first, I thought that's where they lived.

But on the reverse shot, it's very clearly like a tiny New York kitchen where Kate is, and it's absolutely filled with small appliances.

This is a mistake I have made personally.

You have a small kitchen.

You can't clutter the countertops with all your small Peltzer appliances like they have.

What you need is one appliance that folds out from the same device, right?

Like

a like a Peltzer portable bathroom, but for your kitchen.

I know.

I know.

I loved seeing the orange juicer in there.

Just a beloved product.

This derpy Magwai is making a huge mess in there and all over Kate's shirt.

She says something about like we can't afford to replace things.

And then we cut down to the street and Billy shows up home in a taxi.

It's like, okay, you live in New York City.

There is abundant, excellent transportation.

You're taking taxis everywhere.

No wonder you guys are broke.

I think there's such a difference in the sort of New York film that depicts taxi transit versus subway transit.

Yeah.

Like, I think we're meant to understand that Kate and Billy may be struggling financially as a new couple, but they are not unsuccessful.

They're not gritty.

Right.

And I think that's part of it when you're trying to distinguish between the character building a subway ride might give and a taxi.

Yeah, especially in this era.

Like, I think that this is porn store Times Square era.

Yeah, and New York of film in the 70s and 80s was,

you know, presented the subway as basically, you know,

like a you're taking your life in your own hands going down there kind of thing that, you know, it spooked a generation of boomer tourists and

probably also like would color a character taking the subway in a way that a filmmaker would want to be careful about.

Idea

of the Futtermans has been mentioned earlier in the movie in passing.

What we're made to realize is that the Futtermans are expected to stay

with Billy and Kate in their apartment.

And when Billy comes home, and checks to see how Gizmo's doing, realizes it's not Gizmo, A

awful time for the Futtermans to show up is what happens next.

The Futtermans show up and just in time for this ain't Gizmo.

I absolutely love that Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph reprise their roles.

Jackie Joseph especially

is such a delight to me.

The thing about Mr.

Futterman is he is still

traumatized by the events of the first Gremlins film.

You may remember, if for some some reason you haven't seen it, Gremlins took control of his Kentucky Harvester, drove through the porch area of his house, and

attacked he and his wife.

I thought they died.

Maybe I misremembering.

It was ambiguous because we go to the reverse shot, like P.O.V.

Gremlin driving the Kentucky Harvester, and you think it might be ashes.

It's like Butch, Cassidy, and Sundance.

You don't know for sure that they died.

Yeah.

So, yeah he's he's very jumpy billy and kate are like hey listen guys it's cool that you're here a day early but the building's getting fumigated uh you got you can't stay here um just to get the futtermans out of there so that they can get back to clamp world headquarters and uh and replace this unknown magwai with gizmo where do you understand kingston falls to be in relation to new york city because

mrs futterman met mentions it so quickly I can't quite remember.

Like 36 hours is what it took them to get there.

Yeah, I'm like a greyhound.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Oh, boy.

That's tough.

Brutal.

They really like Billy and Kate.

They sure do.

Back at Clamp headquarters, the Magwai are in the mall area getting into the Froyo.

There's a big panic around the Froyo kiosk.

I mean, one of the Magwais is getting waterboarded with Froyo.

What a way to go.

Yeah, again, this ain't gizmo.

I mean, you probably don't even need the washcloth if you're going to waterboard with frozen yogurt, right?

You just wheel the machine in there,

hit the recliner on the chair.

The viscosity does the work for you.

Benicio del Toro, like, straddles you, like, way too close and stamps on the floor.

You don't need to do all that washcloth laundry and then he he pulls the middle handle which is the one that swirls the two sides together probably changes your relationship to frozen yogurt forever at that point oh man it's tough it's tough stuff so billy and kate return to the building and they they're like shit what do we do like the the magwire everywhere and they've eaten and it's past midnight and uh Kate is like, duh, we'll go turn off the water to the whole building.

That will forestall disaster.

A building that I think has hundreds of floors or something.

And so they go down to like the

custodial areas of the building and they start trying to get into where the water main is by using an axe on the padlock that gates it off.

And security is on top of this.

They know what's going on everywhere in the building.

But Billy and Kate get in there and they get to the valve.

and crucially Adam Billy is turning lefty loosey on this valve I was like what how is that gonna close it

uh yeah

I've got a question maybe the only incongruity I found

in the movie Gremlins 2 the new batch Joe Dante, would you have us believe that this is the one building in the New York metropolitan where you turn left to shut off a water valve?

I'll take my answer over by the water fountain that sprays water across the room for some reason.

Give a light.

The derp in the bag bites the nose of this renta cop when he's challenged, and this cop starts firing his service weapon all around.

Like, I think he unloads four or five shots in this scene, somehow manages to not kill Kate or Billy, and off a ricochet hit himself.

Just incredible luck here.

That allows the derpy gremlin to get away.

Unfortunately, Kate and Billy

are arrested on the spot, and Billy ends up getting taken to jail

because in the next scene, Kate bails him out using their rent money.

Yeah, like the camera pans past some LV426 eggs, and then a paddy paddy wagon full of mimes is being unloaded into Central Booking or some shit in Manhattan, and Billy has been sprung from jail by Kate, who was also down there, but I guess didn't get arrested.

Ben, I'm thinking about not putting this out in the world, but fuck it.

Like, let's just speak our minds.

You know how there's so many crossover comics?

Like...

With so many interesting blends of

two franchises.

Oh, sure.

Like X-Men

in space with the crew of the Enterprise D or whatever.

Right.

Predator versus Aliens or whatever.

Sure.

You inspired this, so you're going to get some credit for this, but this is my idea.

Okay.

Aliens versus gremlins.

Whoa.

What do you think happens?

Man.

Because the gremlins multiply at such a rate that I don't think the aliens could kill them fast enough.

I think it's one of those duck-size horses versus

horse-sized duck situations.

And yeah, like the gremlins seem to not mind pain in a lot of contexts, you know?

Yes.

And sometimes they love it.

They're kind of little kinky bitches for pain, so maybe...

Maybe the alien xenomorph wouldn't have anything that could really harm the gremlins at a certain point.

All right.

Here's more to this concept.

We take it on back to Kingston Falls.

Okay.

Where a xenomorph egg is found by Randall Peltzer.

Okay.

Who gets the facehugger in this?

Because

I don't want it to be Mr.

Peltzer.

Isn't there a greater chance that Mr.

Wing would find one of these eggs?

Maybe we change it to...

But I don't want something bad to happen to Mr.

Wing either.

I don't want bad things to happen to anyone we know from Kingston Falls except for the Judge Reinhold character who works at the bank.

Okay, I like that.

That guy should die first.

Or the like, uh, the like landlady.

Oh, she got she got thrown out of the top floor of her of her mansion.

She's dead.

Maybe she was in traction for months and they brought, you know, the dead speak, Adam.

Like, you can bring anybody back for any reason in movies these days.

Whalen Utani, for some reason, opens a Kingston Falls branch.

Yeah, well, the tax benefits were so alluring that

this could happen.

I think there's something to this.

The rights to those two franchises can't be gotten for that much money, right?

Like, we could probably afford to, you know, license them, if not buy them out outright.

Get me in a room.

I'm ready to pitch.

Let's do it.

What if we did this?

Everybody here gets to design their umbrella.

Gizmo has been like wandering around the ductwork of the building for a while.

He falls into the same utility area of the building and gets mugged by some gremlins and taken capture of.

We'll come back to various vignettes of Gizmo the Magwai being tortured by these other characters over the course of the film.

These guys fucking hate Gizmo.

They really do.

They bully him so bad.

Billy and Kate grab some like commemorative

flashlights that I guess are supposed to be like shaped like the building.

Was that your understanding?

Yeah, that's what I got from that.

These are excellent flashlights that are on sale at the souvenir stand in the lobby.

They will come in handy killing gremlins over the course of the movie.

They run into Marla and this kind of reintroduces something like when Billy Billy came home, he had a big lipstick kiss on his cheek.

Kate is suspicious of Billy, thinks that he may be stepping out on her with his boss.

She says to Billy, like, if we survive like the next 24 hours, I'm going to make your nuts look like the planet Earth in the clamp business logo.

Have a powerful day.

Kate is such a fun character.

I would say the one part of this film that disappoints me most is that she is mostly sidelined in it.

Yeah, she should have more to do.

There is a moment in both Gremlins films where you keep the pot

over the boiling water of the gremlins until you just can't hold the lid on it anymore.

And that scene in this film happens in that security office where

the pressure of a bunch of people talking shit about Magwai rules is

happening in conversation.

Like, this is the goof section of the first movie.

This is a message board conversation happening out in the open.

And I love that once the pressure of all of this reaches its apex, out comes a gremlin to absolutely destroy

everyone who would dare to make a comment like this.

What if they're eating in an airplane and they cross a time zone?

I mean, it's always midnight somewhere.

I thought that Picardo's performance in this scene was particularly funny because he's like taken aback somewhat by the arrival of the gremlins, but he doesn't like run or go anywhere or do anything about it.

Like, he's been sort of,

you know, roasting Billy along with the other security haircuts on the idea that this is a problem that they should take seriously until

this gremlin arrives and starts murdering security guards.

But it's not like he pulls out his piece and starts firing into the equipment to try and hit the gremlin.

Like, nothing really happens other than him going, like, yeah, okay, gremlins are a problem.

That will be my new character need

now that I have seen proof that they exist.

We got to cut over to Kate,

who is at work giving a tour.

of the clamp offices where we see one of these studio areas where they're they're making a cooking show.

This cooking show, Ben, is one that I would watch religiously.

It might as well be called What's She Gonna Do with All That Sherry?

Because all of her recipes are sherry-related.

They are disgusting to think about, all of them.

One of them is bean roll-ups with bologna.

Yeah, and one of them is some sort of giant pot of some stew.

We can make the same tuna noodle cheese product chowder surprise in just a few minutes.

She's Midwest Julia Child, and

the recipes

start to go really bad when gremlins appear.

And much like the boiling pot of your metaphor earlier,

one of them's in with the noodles.

Kate tries to fight these gremlins with her flashlight, but it's not working that great.

It's as buggy as some of the other technology in this building, you might say.

I was wondering about the TV lights.

Wouldn't those be bright enough to smoke the grems?

Not in this context.

Don't try to ruin the movie, Ben.

It really gets grotesque in there when

a bunch of metal shit gets thrown in one of the microwaves and it explodes, triggering the fire suppression sprinklers and

just zillions and zillions of baby grems start popping out of the backs of the ones that attacked the TV show set.

The microwave is no friend to the gremlins movie,

it would seem.

I love the super close-up of what happens when a Magwai or a gremlin is exposed to water.

Like you see a level of detail you don't in that first film.

You see them in

the little sacks trying to get out.

Really great effects work there.

Incredible creature effects.

And yeah, it's super gross.

speaking of gross Incredible effects mr.

Clamp's office assistant gets replaced by a gremlin who then attacks him and Clamp fights back by dropping him into a paper shredder and this gremlin gets turned into pickle relish like a gallon of it

Finally at this point it becomes a gremlins movie.

I was waiting for the shocking gore.

Yeah.

This is that moment.

Yeah, and it's it's it's so surprising because you're like, okay, Mr.

Clamp is going to be in this movie and he's going to get his comeuppance for sure.

Sure.

But Billy and Robert Picardo's character show up to warn him and he's like, yeah, like I'm covered in pickle relish.

I am aware of the problem.

And Billy's case that he's making is like, the fact that it's morning time

is keeping the rest of New York safe from these things.

Like the fact that the building is surrounded by sunlight is basically the only thing preventing an infestation that will destroy New York City.

So we got to take advantage of that.

But, you know, we got to figure out a way to get rid of all of these, like, you know, evacuate the humans and lock the building down before this becomes a citywide problem.

This potential is stated in dialogue.

I think one area where the film fails is that we don't get enough connective tissue between locations to establish the size of New York City in a way to underscore the scope of this problem.

Like we are so locked into the building.

We're talking about the idea of gremlins flourishing across New York.

I think we need a few more scenes of New York.

Like we need the Michael Bay montage of like New Yorkers doing New York shit and this is what we're fighting for.

You know?

You need like a cab driver like looking up out the front window of his cab as a bat gremlin swoops, swoops down.

This is something that the Ghostbusters movies do so well, right?

Totally.

He's been working overtime.

And I tell you why we're here.

We're here because some diaper bang downtown's been a jerk.

I'm making his working on Friday night.

Am I right, Peter?

What's your ride, Raymond?

Is he right?

See?

Yo.

We cut to like the elevator where Kate is getting attacked through the walls by gremlins.

Very like hentai fantasy moment here.

Oh, yeah.

Eventually, the elevator crashes on top of like dozens of gremlins, and

just an absolutely massive amount of table-side guacamole gets produced in one moment.

We cut over to the TV studios where Leonard Malton is reviewing the film Gremlins on

a very cynical film criticism show.

Pretty great.

I love that Leonard Malton's in on the joke.

I think that's neat.

Yeah.

We witness the murder of Leonard Malton with a garret made of 35 millimeter film.

Yeah.

Like, what a way to go out.

RSVP Leonard Malton.

This entire film turns on this moment in the lab when the gremlins start getting into

the stuff there.

There's a gremlin that...

eats vegetable medley and turns into a vegetable gremlin.

There's another one drinking a brain hormone.

There's another one becoming a bat.

It's clear that we are going to get a proliferation of gremlins that are variations on the theme.

Yeah.

And the leader is going to be brain gremlin.

It seemed like he immediately, upon

getting his flowers for algernon potion, invented a

genetic level sunblock that will enable them to go out into the city during the daytime.

I thought that was already there.

He invented it?

Oh, oh, yeah, I guess that does make sense that it would be there in the lab.

It is labeled.

You mean he also learned how to make labels?

Yeah, so he sends like the bat gremlin out through.

I couldn't believe that they didn't get the music sting from the Tim Burton Batman movie.

Yeah.

For this, but they didn't.

There are so many incestuous film relationships kicked off.

Yeah.

Starting with this scene.

Yeah, I thought the same.

But anyways, Bat Gremlin

is, I think, the film's attempt to have that connective tissue between what's going on in the clamp building and the rest of the city.

It attacks Murray Futterman while he's out seeing sights with his wife, and he successfully encases it in wet concrete, and then it goes and flies up onto the top of a cathedral and becomes a gremgoyle.

It's a pity.

How about Murray Futterman?

Yeah.

Getting the W here.

Good for him.

I loved his safari jacket.

This movie needs 25% more Futman.

Not because it's bad without it, just because it's greater with it.

I think all movies, to some extent, need 25% more Futterman.

Yeah.

So back in the building, we get a brain wrap and film melt effect

happening in the middle of the movie.

An idea that sells the idea that the gremlins are in the very theater we're watching this movie in, and the theater owner works with the projectionist

to get a Hulk Hogan out of the audience to get everything back on track.

Just a breathtaking cameo that you never see coming.

But I guess in like the late 80s, early 90s, yeah there's a non-zero chance that hulk hogan is going to show up in your movie doing hulk hogan as hulk hogan in full hulk hogan regalia yeah like i love the idea that he like oils himself up and goes out to watch a a children's film and then like

you don't want to sit on the theater seat after hulk hogan's been there i don't think and was it like a black and white nudie picture that they were showing in the theater oh i didn't see Like, I don't know.

It seemed like the movie that they were projecting in lieu of Gremlins 2 in this weird fourth wall-breaking concept set piece was meant to be like sort of a lewd picture.

But we come back to the movie, and Frank the Dracula, that we met earlier in the TV studio, is watching all of these TVs where local reporters from various TV stations around New York are are saying, like, something strange is happening in the neighborhood of the Clamp building, but we couldn't say exactly what.

And he's like,

I'm in the building.

My dream in life has always been to be a TV news reporter.

I'm going to take this for the opportunity it is.

And

he recruits one of the tourists that was on

the tour that Kate was leading, a Japanese guy, stereotypically

shudder buggy Japanese guy who's going to become his cameraman.

And they start setting about reporting on Clamp News Network what's going on inside the Clamp building.

A very recognizable Getty Watanabe, like from 16 Candles and UHF, like just all the movies of its day.

I love this guy.

He's great.

Of all of the like evil characters that were introduced at the beginning of the movie, who did you have your money on going first?

Was it Christopher Lee?

Yeah, probably.

I mean, both because he's the most evil, but also because is he the biggest star?

I just mean that in a way of like, let's hurry up and get to that's a wrap for Christopher Lee, you know?

Not that he's like a huge star, but he's like a prestige player in the way that.

Not a lot of the rest of the people in this

movie are necessarily.

You're picking up what I'm putting down yeah one of these gremlins gets his hands on an Uzi in the midst of this scene in the scene in the genetics lab which I guess is just like a throwaway joke like oh yeah we do have some like some small machine guns around in case of animals escaping speaking of bazookas

one of the gremlins transforms into a

highly sexualized Marilyn Monroe type lady gremlin whose sexual attraction to Robert Picardo cannot be quenched.

I thought for sure, like we saw Gizmo watching Rambo vs.

Blood Part 2 earlier in the movie, and

the proximity of him escaping his bonds and the gremlins that have been torturing him up to now, and that

Uzi machine gun fire made me think that for sure sure they were going to get Gizmo armed and dangerous with

some automatic weapons at some point in this.

And why hold back on the Rambo First Blood Part 2 references?

Let's dip Gizmo into a well of pig shit.

Let's hook him up to a mattress frame that's been connected to a car battery.

Let's go all the way.

I had to pause the movie because I was like in this Mandela effect moment where I was like, isn't the poster of this movie Gizmo with two bandaliers of AK-47 ammo like crossing his chest and like a gun and a and a headband?

And then I was like, have I imagined that?

It is such a vivid picture in my head.

Huh.

I don't remember seeing that.

In my little cast and crew app that I use.

Like the that is not anything like the the Gremlins 2 poster.

I mean, and as soon as you do a Google search for

Gizmo, it's just sex toys on every tab for you.

That's a whole other problem.

Yeah,

I don't know where I got it in my head that that was an image that existed in the world, but I couldn't find an example of it.

This

is G2, people.

We're writing Gremlins 2.

It should be a party.

There is an attempt where Mr.

Clamp is trying to get outside the building and Mr.

Futterman is trying to get in.

The idea of which starts here.

They're eventually going to change spots, but they need a plan.

What are they going to do about all these gremlins?

The plan that Billy proposes is changing the time on all of the building's clocks, which is an idea that's hilarious to me because the gremlins can tell time.

They're looking at the clocks to know when it's going to be okay to go outside.

That's phase one of the plan.

Phase two is to create some sort of environment where in the lobby it looks like it's dusk or night.

If we can just get all the gremlins to the lobby by virtue of the time change and then make them believe that it's night when they get there, they can eventually dot, dot, dot, expose them to sunlight is the idea here.

Mr.

Clamp likes this idea because it will be great press for him.

He will be a dude that saved the day if he can get this plan to work.

One of the most impressive props in this entire film is the escape pipe that Mr.

Clamp rises up out of on a New York City sidewalk.

How did they build this?

I got to believe this is still there.

Like it is built into like a real manhole, it looks like.

Yeah.

If it's not, it is a flawless illusion.

Like if that's like a a platform that they built slightly above the street and like did some kind of trick of the eye to make it look like he's rising up out of the sidewalk.

It's so fucking cool.

So Clamp gets out of this escape tree and Futterman gets in.

And that's how they trade spots in the movie.

And that's important because Billy is in a dentist chair about to be

drilled by dentist gremlin.

And he's saved just in the nick of time by Mr.

Fudderman.

Yeah.

Who uses the light and mirror attachment that you get above a dentist's chair to bright light this guy the hell out of there.

It's amazing.

Kate and Marla, meanwhile, have fallen afoul of Spider-Grim.

Billy and Futterman are racing to help them, but it's actually Gizmo or Gizbo

that saves the day with his

jumbo.

What do you call these?

Like these paper fasteners that are like the extra big kind that he's unfolded.

Yeah, I think they're just the office supply butterfly

paperclip.

Man, love those things.

You don't see them these days.

Really don't.

He kills off Spider-Gram,

and

we get a little moment that's like a callback to Kate's story about her dad dying in the chimney in the previous film where she starts to launch into some story about how she's haunted by Lincoln's birthday.

And

Billy's like, come on, Kate, like, we can't do another one of these.

This was the moment where I feel like Phoebe Kate demonstrated that she should have been in more of this movie.

Like,

this is a reference Ouroboros here of like,

this is a hilarious, self-referential moment, but also she should have been in more of the movie.

She should have just gotten to say the story, you know?

I'm dying to know what the story was.

I was too.

That Santa story is so good and so fucking crazy.

I wanted to see if it could be topped.

And maybe this is an example.

Like in so many ways, this is a film that seeks to top its original.

Yeah.

That maybe that first Santa story can't be topped.

Maybe that's the apex tragedy story of the Gremlins universe.

Yeah,

that would have been the thing.

that really took this over the line and made it great.

How much darkness is in Kate's character?

Given that she has two stories.

She is way more haunted than like Picard post being assimilated by the Borg ever was.

Kate walked so every Aubrey Plaza character ever could run.

I think.

So we get a great big like multifaceted musical number.

toward the end of this film as the throngs and throngs of gremlins, having been tricked by the building's timepieces, gather in the lobby and prepare to go out into the city, believing that it's night because Mr.

Clamp has like draped a huge illustration of the night sky in the lobby.

And it's like, you know, brain gremlin singing, sexy lady gremlin has a has a beat in there, and we're getting ready to drop the cloth and just burn all these gremlins alive when, uh-oh, thunder cracks and clouds move in front of the sun.

Pretty much the worst outcome would be a rainstorm.

Right?

Holy moly, this is bad news.

One type of gremlin we have not described up until now is Electric Gremlin, which

has at this point been trapped into the video phone of Mr.

Clamp's office.

What Billy thinks up in this moment is: if we can't get these gremlins out into the light, maybe Mr.

Fudderman can shoot them with the fire hose.

We can get an electric gremlin down here

through something Kate's able to do with the phone system and electrocute them all,

all of them at once.

This is like,

in terms of like, I don't know, high-concept, low-concept

film writing, it's just like nothing

like the idea, like, okay, so we have to buy that a gremlin can become a being of pure energy that can then be sucked into the receiver of a telephone and because that phone is on hold you can then transfer the call to a different phone down in the lobby of the same building and that turns the the handset of that phone into a gremlin lightning gun uh for this movie to work.

That's a pill you are going to have to swallow if this movie works for for you.

This movie is all pills, though.

It really is.

That almost seems insignificant

in the broad scheme of things.

Like, yeah, obviously.

If you can believe everything else, you can believe that.

So, like, Mr.

Futterman had been outside begging a young Isaiah Whitlock Jr.

not to turn the fire hoses on.

I guess because this movie was for kids, he didn't get to say his signature line.

Now they have turned the fire hose on the gremlins inside and just like electrocuted the shit out of them.

And it's a fucking green curdled bloodbath in there.

In come the troops led by Mr.

Clamp.

Mr.

Clamp given

a machine gun and all of the regalia of like a National Guard type troop.

He charges in there hard and slips immediately on the gremlins gore.

Did you spot Dean Norris in the SWAT team there?

Yeah.

Amazing.

So cool.

So, yeah, they are kind of like ankle deep in gremlin chowder, and uh, Clamp gets himself up and cleans himself off.

And, uh, you know, for a billionaire asshole who sort of seemed like he was going to get what he deserved in this movie, instead, we're going to get the scene where he tells us what he learned.

And it's not much.

I don't know.

I thought this is kind of sweet, the way this ended.

It's nice he gives Fred the Dracula a job as like a news anchor.

Yeah.

Get behind that.

He's inspired by the people and the values of Kingston Falls.

He's like, you know what?

That painting really touched me.

Yeah.

I want to make Kingston Falls my next project.

Yeah.

And with all the merchandising ideas he's got for Gizmo, he's going to have the revenue stream to build it.

It sort of seems like he's taking a shine to Marla.

That's going to be nice for her.

I think it's better for everyone if Marla is

off the market.

Yeah.

It's going to go out over the company PA.

Did you forget about one gremlin?

Because I sure did.

One last thing this movie has to deal with is whatever happened to the Marilyn Monroe gremlin.

Turns out she wants to be made an honest gremlin.

In the high-floor bathroom, she's been locked in with the Robert Picardo character.

And

it appears as though the Robert Picardo character's heart has been melted by her.

And

he will fuck this gremlin.

And he will marry this gremlin?

This summer, you will believe Robert picardo will a gremlin

that's all ben did you like this movie

okay you guys know that none of that is gonna be in the actual movie

i like this movie a lot uh much hay has been made over how few fucks it gives how much it is just like is it an idea is like will it be fun and weird to watch on in a movie let's do it it has it is so self-confidently incoherent

that its incoherence becomes one of its charms, I want to say.

And yeah,

I really had a lot of fun watching it.

Got me into a nice cozy holiday mood, Adam.

Interesting.

I didn't get a ton of holiday vibes from this.

No, I'm just...

I'm doing bits.

You know what?

You can find a holiday mood just about anywhere you look for it, like that scientist going on a little walk about in a city,

finding gizmo.

Ben, I actually thought this film was far more coherent than I expected.

Like, I expected this one to be, like, almost completely nihilistic, but I was impressed by its focus and control.

Like, this is a tactical and specific takedown of corporate culture, the film criticism machine, and of gremlins itself.

And that last part I think is so important because the best satire has the ability to send themselves up while they're at it.

I thought that was a magic trick that this film had.

No one needs to know how the gremlins are so aware of popular culture.

Their understanding of pop culture is astounding and preternatural.

And like,

that...

That is as shocking as a gremlin turning into a spider after drinking a potion or whatever.

I love how no one ever wonders about that.

Nobody's curious.

I'm nervous to wonder about it because I feel like if I did, a gremlin's going to pop out of my monitor and attack me.

I love all the weird cameos.

I love how

I was truly put on my back foot watching this movie, not expecting what was going to happen scene to scene.

And that you can't say about most films.

Truly.

Like,

scene to scene, just a wonder and a spectacle throughout.

What a movie.

It's no replacement to the original Gremlins,

but a fine addition to the universe.

And I saw that there's an animated gremlin series on the HBO app.

I haven't seen any of that.

It seems as though the gremlins universe goes on.

Yeah.

I haven't watched any of that.

I don't know if it's good, but

maybe I will after this.

It was nice to be reminded of the gremlins i heard uh jordan morris speaking highly of that gremlins animated series uh on a podcast um

yeah i mean nice to see steven spielberg make a little money off of something you know

yeah pretty great

all right adam this has been a lot of fun this is a bonus episode And that means no priority one messages, but it does mean we have a lot of gratitude for the friends of DeSoto who step up and put a little bit of money out every month to keep things like this show going.

We hugely appreciate you and hope you have a wonderful holiday this year.

I guess that just leaves one question for me, Adam.

I have no idea what you can ask, given how unexpected every moment was in this movie.

Well, I guess my question is: did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda?

Drunk Shimoda!

We barely talked about brain gremlin,

but that scene where the Robert Prosky character does the studio interview with him

and he takes out a gun and

murders the gremlin right next to him

is such an insane flex.

Like on the one hand, he styles and presents himself as an intellectual

and then by murdering that gremlin he's also able to like step outside of himself and describe how insane that moment is

within a greater conversation about the gremlins rights movement that he has taken upon himself to further

there is so much to brain gremlin yeah

I think they used him just enough, though.

Like, I feel like he could have taken over.

And when you put him on the movie poster, I think the expectation is he is going to be the antagonist of the film, but he kind of isn't.

It's just gremlins in general are the enemy.

I like that he got glasses when he got smart.

That was so fun.

That was great.

I like that he had a weird

Australian accent as voiced by Tony Randall.

Yeah.

Great character.

Yeah.

That's my drunk Shimoda, Ben.

What about you?

God, that's pretty persuasive.

I think I'm going to give it to Marge the Microwave Lady.

I think that the funniest characters in these movies to me are the ones that are just minding their own fucking business and have no context for what starts happening to them.

Like,

she stands around just like screaming and coping with the fact that gremlins have come into her existence for such a long time.

Her life and her career is baloney and stew.

And all of a sudden, this happens.

She is like a functional alcoholic who just goes and like stirs pots on tv every day she didn't need this

she doesn't need this

this scene makes me want a microwave marge sweatshirt though like it's it seems like there's branded products having to do with this show that's got to exist right I mean, somebody's like got got like a red bubble store of that, probably.

Fuck it, Ben.

We're putting it in the store.

The sweatshirt that you see in this movie from this television show.

Podshop.biz.

Wow.

There it will be.

Just in time for the holidays.

Yeah, enjoy.

Very inspirational was Microwave Marge.

Yeah, we're definitely not the first creeps to come up with this idea.

So many Redbubble links.

All right.

Well, forget that, then.

If you're an FOD who wants their merchandise, go ahead and get it.

Go get it from somebody else that also doesn't own the rights.

Well, Adam, this has been a ton of fun.

Yeah, another great year of bonus episodes.

Thanks to the support we get at maximumfund.org slash join.

Looking forward to another year of great bonus episodes.

Who knows

what sequels we'll watch?

Who knows what meals we'll enjoy and review.

Could be anything.

Who knows what guests will be a part of this great thing we do?

It's going to be great.

Looking forward to it.

Hey, and thanks to Rob Adler for editing this episode.

Make it so.

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