Critters

What makes Critters more than a ripoff are its humor and its sense of style. This is a movie made by people who must have had fun making it. Read full review

For its many lighter moments, Critters is careful to balance its laughs with a number of chills. It unabashedly and wittily pays homage to other films. But ultimately it stands firmly on its own, a little bit frightening and a lot of fun. [15 Apr 1986, p.3C]

Derivative but tongue-in-cheek enough to have a following. Read full review

Judging from the title, Spielberg's Gremlins would be the immediate target, and indeed Critters does share a sardonic similarity. In fact, Critters looks like several dozen films without looking like any one of them, the action and characters lifted whole from a dissimilar plethora of cinematic sources and underscored with a sizzling sarcasm which elevates it from its source material. Read full review

Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise. Read full review

One of the most enjoyable films of the summer, Critters harks back to the low-budget science fiction films of the 1950s and balances the thrills with heavy doses of humor. Read full review

Critters mounts a moment or two of suspense, but director Herek has as much wit and even less visual imagination than the people who created Night of the Comet. [16 Apr 1986, p.C6]

Critters is a dumb, but sometimes likable little movie: maybe an odd comment, since it contains savage killings, mutilations and general bloodshed and evisceration. [25 Apr 1986, p.8]

The idea, apparently, was to combine elements of E.T., Gremlins and run-of-the-mill slasher films, while keeping the whole thing palatable for pre-teens. Only Steven Spielberg has been able to make this combination work, and even he has had trouble with it; director Stephen Herek, who also worked on the Critters script, is the wrong Steve. [30 Apr 1986, p.C7]

It's commercially calculated to have something for everyone - suspense, humor, even a bounty hunter from the krites' planet who poses as a rock star. Unfortunately, the film doesn't have the humor or the budget to match any of these goals. Read full review

Critters resemble oversize hairballs and roll like tumbleweeds when prodded into action, the perfect menace for this irritatingly insipid and lightweight film which unfolds with plodding predictability and leaves few cliches unturned. Read full review