Exploring Gremlins 2 The New Batch

back in 1984 the original gremlins wowed audiences with its mixture of humor and black comedy bundled up inside a very clever creature feature it was a huge success pulling in a hundred and fifty three million dollars in the US alone which more than covered its 11 million dollar budget almost immediately began talks of a sequel for the studio's there was just too much franchise potential and that means beyond the movies toys games books and so on the first scripts for the proposed sequel started coming in and they were nothing more than slight rehashes of the original gizmo gets water on him gremlins eat after midnight and proceeded to trash small-town Joe Dante who directed the original and Steven Spielberg who produced the original read the scripts but passed on all of them Dante had little interests in doing the same movie again so he moved on to other projects years went by and one of the executives at Warner Brothers contacted Dante he told him to come up with an idea for gremlins 2 and no matter how outlandish they would make it Dante contacted writer Chris Haws who came up with the concept of raising the stakes significantly and moving the gremlins out of a small town in into New York even though the studio's wanted something unconventional they still balked at the idea of gremlins in New York not that they dislike the idea just that having gremlins running amuck in the city would have made the budget beyond what they were willing to spend Dante reassured them that they could get around this by having the film set in New York but having the gremlins contained inside of a building Warner Brothers agreed in the production moved forward now with a 50 million dollar budget that eclipsed the original Dante had the daunting task of creating a sequel to a film that was already a certified classic the new script revolved around Billy and Cate now living in New York and working for media mogul Daniel clamp gizmo sold a clamps genetics lab and for the sake of not spoiling the entire film one thing leads to another and bam gremlins Dante made the film as a satire on the extravagance of where the country was heading cable TV genetic experimentation and frozen yogurt he nailed it with the cable TV explosion back then we didn't have hundreds of channels but here they are showing The Cooking Channel the archery Channel and even the Golf Channel all of which are here today well maybe not the archery Channel yet he even called it with the overly expensive but ultimately bland office work environments that came on later in the 90s mister Peltzer do you know how much the clamp organization has spent to provide its employees with art by recognized artists at this facility i pleasing color-coordinated authorized dante contacted chris wallace who did the effects for the original wallace was signed on to direct the fly too at the time so he declined knowing how much the success of the film hinged on the creature effects dante contacted one of the best in the business Rick Baker Baker declined because he felt that he would have little creative control and would just be recreating designs wallace had done years earlier dante convinced him that he would have plenty of new designs when he explained the concept of the gremlin mutants technology had advanced quite a bit in the six years since the original so baker was able to design the puppets to have a much greater range of expressions in doing this though the puppets were much larger than the ones in the original they needed this extra space to fiddle the servos and wires for the scenes where it was just the gremlins Baker made the puppets double sized in order to show more detail and give them greater control the close-up of gizmo building his bow and arrow were done by using an actual person's hands because they couldn't get the puppet hands to move right Dante wanted to do one effect they weren't able to do in the original and that was to show gizmo in a full shot moving they were able to do this in the beginning and then later in the film when he was dancing for the dancing sequence originally he was dancing to a Billy Idol song and the studio reassured Dante that they had the rights after everything was filmed the studio told them that they weren't able to secure the rights since the scene was too long and too expensive to reshoot they searched for a song with the exact beat and finally settled on I'm ready by Fats Domino in the scene where clamp is attacked by a gremlin he's actually holding him with one arm and controlling him with the other it was Baker's idea to give mohawk scales instead of a mohawk like spike the gestation sequences were much more elaborate here Dante did this because they couldn't in the original because they just didn't have the budget they brought back production designer Jack Spencer who worked on the original to design the building they built the interiors four clamps building inside Warner Brothers largest set in keeping with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek nature of the original Spencer design clamps tower to be a art building where nothing worked they build all the stages elevated so the puppeteers could work underneath when Dante filmed the first movie he learned that filming the puppet work in the same time is working with the actors created for too much downtime for them since there were always technical issues with the animatronics for the sequel he shot all the scenes with the actors up front and after all that filming was done he shot six weeks of scenes with just the puppets when Baker first came on board he wanted to add more character work with the gremlins he and Dante came up with the personalities for the four main evil gremlins they based these two off George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men they based this one on Daffy Duck and mohawk was a modified version of stripe from the first film in the movie some of the gremlins drink various potions from the genetics lab this gives them different abilities and let Baker and his team have a creative field day this is a phone system in hall they had the bat gremlin who gets injected with the sunblock chemical which allowed him to go outside his movements were done using stop-motion animation the spider gremlin on top of looking great made his first appearance paired with angel of death by Slayer which was both unexpected and awesome for the close-up of the spider it was controlled with wires and rods and for the wide shots it was done with stop-motion animation however the most impressive gremlin in my opinion was the brain gremlin voiced by Tony Randall the mouth movements of this thing was nothing short of amazing oh we may stumble along the way but civilization yes the Geneva Convention chamber music Susan Sontag everything your society has worked so hard to accomplish over the centuries that's what we aspire to we want to be civilized I mean you take a look at this scale here they were able to achieve this by using a Guilder fluke which is a control system used in everything from Park animations to dancing water fountains Howie Mandel returned to voice gizmo Frank Welker who was the voice of stripe as well as many other miscellaneous gremlins return to do the voice of Mohawk Zack Galligan Phoebe Cates dick Miller and Jackie Joseph all returned to reprise their roles from the original Dante had previously worked with the great Robert Picardo on the burbs as well as inner space so he brought him in here with a much larger role John Glover played the multi-millionaire Daniel clamp while originally the character was suppose to be evil Glover played him with such boyish charm they changed his character Christopher Lee was brought in to play doctor catheter the first thing he did when he arrived was apologizing to Joe Dante for starring in the howling to Warner Brothers allowed Dante a huge amount of leeway with the film because they needed it to open against touchstones Dick Tracy they were afraid that Dick Tracy would unseat the box-office records they set with Batman the year earlier even with all they let him get away with they still had limits the original ending of the film had clamp ordering the building to be filled with cement thus encasing all the gremlins the studio deemed it too expensive and said it made the scenes on film Abal Dante and Hawes had painted themselves into a corner and spent the next few weeks toiling over a new ending they finally had the idea of frying the gremlins with the electric one this scene was shot using a miniature set and added opticals for the electrocution the movie was full of homages cameos and clever inside jokes Daffy on top of the clamp Tower model was no Maj to King Kong grandpa fred was no Maj to Grandpa al from the Munsters as well as an homage to the late-night horror hosts the musical sequence was an homage to the movie Dame's this scene was a blatant goof on the Phantom of the Opera complete with the Phantom going out of focus the gremlin melting was no ma to The Wizard of Oz the scene where the brain gremlin is transforming is an homage to dr. Jekyll mr. Hyde the flasher gremlin was no majd the scene in the original movie the microwave explosion was no maje to the microwave death in the original when the bat gremlin flies out of the lab it leaves the Batman symbol on the wall as an homage to the ridiculously successful Batman movie the year earlier the studio executives of Warner Brothers love this the vectorscope lab was the name of the lab in Dantes inner space which Avista still owns permission they were able to get gizmo to mimic Stallone's rambo character gizmo is wearing the armband remember his owner and friend mr. wing key Luke who played mr. wing passed on a year after the film was released they poked fun at the original film by having this scene where they question the rules okay wait wait what if one of them eats something at 11 o'clock but did he get something stuck in his teeth yeah like a caraway seed or a sesame soon all right and after 12 o'clock it comes out now he didn't eat that after mid I didn't we can rule simple rules I don't believe this as well as a few jabs at merchandising it's funny I look at him you know what I see what's that sir dolls with suction cups staring out car windows the scene where the mother drags the daughter out of the movie was inspired by real events during a screening of gremlins and angry mother lambasted Dante for making such a grotesque film as a joke to Rick Baker Dante included a scene from the film octoman which is the first film that Baker worked on he designed the octoman costume the Cameo list and this is a mile-long John Astin Charlie Haas composer Jerry Goldsmith and his wife Carol Jason Preston Henry Gibson Julia Sweeney Hulk Hogan Bubba Smith Dick Butkus Kathleen Freeman dick Bartel Getty Watanabe Kenneth Tobey and even Dante himself as grandpa Fred's director movie critic Leonard Maltin trashed the original gremlins as retaliation Dante offered for him to have a cameo in the sequel where he gets killed Maltin having a good sense of humor agreed and gets eviscerated by the gremlins he went on to give gremlins to three out of four and called the scene a gratuitous cameo when Steven Spielberg saw the first cut of the film he said there were too many gremlin scenes so they had to scale it back considering there's a full gremlin song and dance number it hard to imagine this film with more gremlins after over five months of shooting the film finally wrapped and was released into the udders on June 15 1990 well it did go up against Dick Tracy like they wanted to it did little to affect it and came in fourth place while Tracy opened in first and was one of the biggest moneymakers that year the movie was a flop and only made back 41 of its 50 million dollar budget domestically it's unclear as to why gremlins 2 wasn't a success critics liked it but audiences didn't seem interested perhaps it was too far removed from the original Dante believed the movie was a failure due to it being released so long after the original it had lost too much momentum that the original one created so by the time it was released audiences didn't care anymore how did it come out a year or two after the first it most likely would have been a huge hit the irony is that the movie that would have come out of that would have been drastically different than the one we got even though the sequel didn't do well I'm glad they were able to make it Joe Dante was basically given 50 million dollars and told to go nuts which he did there was so much creativity in this film that they most likely wouldn't have been able to make it under the heavy scrutiny of a studio that relies too much on focus groups and test audiences rather than relying on the directors creative vision the movie is a shining example of what happens when you give incredibly talented people almost complete artistic freedom the downside is that because the movie didn't make money they're gonna blame it on the fact that it was too ambitious when the film made it to DVD a new audience discovered it and found out what a wonderful film it is clever funny brimming with satire and overflowing with ideas Dante even broke the fourth wall to incorporate the audience into the film the movie gets so much right it's a tragedy that it's often overlooked it's a sequel that goes above and beyond everything from its predecessor while the original gremlins is a well deserved classic and a movie that I love gremlins 2 is better in every way dr. catheter this just came for you Oh splendid this must be my malaria just ravings I've got rabies I'm supposed to get the flu this week I think we have the flu our backward let's take what I have that piggy oh yes sure thank you

Channel: GoodBadFlicks

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Keywords: good bad flicks, Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Film), good bad movies, Gremlins (Film)

Id: 33PSQjs3lrk

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2014