Critters: A Four Course Feast! (1986-1992) – Ample pickings of cinema’s forgotten freaks

A physical media habit can be a bit like gorging yourself on junk food. Whenever a label like Arrow Video offers up a curated bunch of greasy, low-brow, nostalgic pleasures, it’s tough not to water at the mouth like a gibbering animal with the mere thought of adding a franchise like Critters to your own home media collection. This particular set comes with the excitable title of  A Four Course Feast!, bringing together the original cycle depicting Dominic Muir’s mischievously murderous munchers and their sustained reigns of terror on small towns, big cities and the final frontier alike, promising a great variety of tastes and textures that will leave any diner satisfied. Yet the Critters films always played modest second fiddle to their contemporaries, unintentionally but unfortunately following on the coat-tails of fellow demented puppet films like the beloved Gremlins or the…also similar Ghoulies. But do the Critters stand out from the pack nearly four decades on our screens? This four-sided square meal makes an argument as strong as its flavour profile that yes, it does.

The whole sinewy saga kicks off in Stephen Herek’s Critters from 1986, where a prison spacecraft transporting intergalactic baddies is subject to a daring escape: a bunch of rabid Krites (diminutive furry maneaters whose closest cousins are porcupines and the Cheshire Cat) hijack a pod and make a beeline for Earth, sending alarm bells ringing and two bounty hunters (Ug and Lee, the former of which is played by deadpan stoicism by Terrence Mann, the latter remains uncredited as, well, his head is essentially a large lump of radioactive chewing gum) on their trail. Crash landing in the sleepy Kansas town of Grover’s Bend, the nibbly little devils cause chaos on the Brown family farm, leading local law enforcement (headed up by M. Emmet Walsh in traditionally grumpy form) and extraterrestrial law enforcement to converge in explosive fashion and rid the unsuspecting family of their lethal pests for good.

Herek’s first entry is meat-and-potatoes fare, sturdy and straightforward but ultimately eclipsed by its later mutations. The family unit have solid combative chemistry, feeling a little more three-dimensional than your average horror nuclear family, thanks in good part to Dee Wallace being a steady hand when it comes to a protective mother role (encounters with E.T. and Cujo respectively made her no-brainer good casting for fighting off these bitey alien fiends) and Scott Grimes as rambunctious teen Brad. For support, they’re ably joined by an ever-reliable Walsh, a game scaredy-cat in Lin Shaye’s Sally and the ever-present heart of the franchise, alcoholic conspiracy theorist Charlie (Don Keith Opper, whose brother Barry produces throughout the series and later steps in as story writer for Critters 3 and 4), all of whom must step up to the plate to save not just the farm, but maybe the world. It’s a fine nostalgic blast that introduces the rules of its sci-fi realm solidly, yet there’s the sense that it’s still following in Gremlins footsteps, lacking in its genuine mania or cartoonishness and landing somewhere in the fun-but-disposable zone.

It’s perhaps the subtitle of Critters 2 that makes up for the first’s shortcomings. Calling your swiftly-produced sequel The Main Course sets out a gauntlet few films would be able to live up to, but Mick Garris’ bigger, funnier, brighter follow-up delivers. Scott Grimes returns as an older Brad, sworn to secrecy about the madness at the farm yet hounded by rumour and suspicion as he simply tries to have fun with his health-freak grandma (Herta Ware) at Easter. By some cruel twist of fate, the eggs she’s handed out to the local children at the Easter fair are actually a Critter litter, and it’s not long before the entire town is overrun with the hideous beasties once again.

With a wider canvas, Garris and Riddick creator David Twohy relish the opportunity to up the goofiness. With some satirical ideas about fast food (bolstered by a catchy jingle for unappealing local burger joint, ‘The Hungry Heifer’ – they won’t give you a bum steer!) and a very boyish sense of humour (which can be a detriment at points – poor Roxanne Kehorna!), The Main Course goes for broke, snowballing into a finale which executes a literal snowball of an idea with gusto and genuinely amazing practical effects; you wouldn’t think a station wagon vs. a giant hairball would be gripping or funny, but surprise surprise, it’s both.

The wacky tone carries over to Critters 3, this time helmed by Kristine Peterson, taking the action to the (relatively) big city as a half-half-dozen of Krite eggs find their way onto an RV undercarriage and end up wreaking havoc in a rundown tenement building. As ever, the cast are a likeable bunch, and this chapter is most notable for being the first feature-film role for Leonardo DiCaprio, whose sulky teen Josh is satisfactorily watchable, yet not quite the calling card of a future megastar. The real star of the show is the change of scenery; like Demons 2 before it, the location shift to a tower block gives some solid architectural intrigue, with plenty of chaos being caused by faulty elevators, loose wiring and laundry chutes. There is some manic fun to be had with the slapstick scrapes of trying to get to a working telephone from the roof of a burning building that forms the most inspired gag in the entire Critters saga, once again proving that these sequels have the juice when critics have not been especially kind to them. 

Rupert Harvey’s Critters 4 kicks things up a notch further, taking place nearly 50 years in the future and finding now-seasoned alien bounty hunter Charlie transporting the last surviving Krites back to their captivity by the shifty TerraCor organisation; however, it’s not long before his his run-in with the blue collar workers aboard the salvage vessel Tesla set the Krites free and running amuck once more, this time inside a pressurised hunk of junk floating in the dead of space. If any Alien fans’ alarm bells are ringing, it’s with good reason, as while the Critters franchise is otherwise derivative of Gremlins and its ilk, Critters 4 takes a left-field turn towards the iconic thrills of cinema’s best space thriller series. With that comes a tone bereft of laughs that still somehow retains some charm, but very little danger; it’s almost impossible to take the threat of the Krites with the same severity as H. R. Giger’s perfect organism. However, it’s thanks to the series’ most bizarrely-stacked cast that this sort of works, with Don Keith Opper being backed up by Angela Bassett, Brad Dourif, Lars von Trier collaborator Anders Hove and Twin Peaks’ Eric DaRe, all giving far better performances than the material calls for. A stretch for the story that brings it full circle and tops off the cycle with an eccentric final note, the much-maligned Critters 4 holds just as much interest as any of its sibling films.

With all four films being presented with fun audio commentaries from critics Matty Budrewicz and Dave Wain and spruced up solid archive featurettes, it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew with the Critters universe in this stacked boxset. Critters remains what it is: a daft lark of a franchise with plenty close (and often better) cousins. Yet there’s a charm to the tone of these films that has allowed it to morph into something that, say, Gremlins never did; had Gremlins gone on beyond The New Batch, would we have seen the wee terrors leave the stratosphere? We may never know, but if you want to see what may have happened, it may have looked something like this four-film indulgence that takes its humble beginnings to where no ravenous furball has gone before.

Simon’s Archive – Critters: A Four Course Feast!