Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 331: Fri Nov 27

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante, 1990): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.40 & 9.30pm 


This movie, a superior one to the original in my opinion, also features an introduction and a Q&A with the star Zach Gilligan as do the screenings of Gremlins at the Prince Charles. The film is being screened from a 35mm print.

New York Times review:
Gremlins is grounded in a fundamental division in American popular culture, between the sweetness and sociability of the Disney features, and the unbridled id of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes shorts. If the forces of Disney win in the first film — the gremlins are lulled into complacency by a screening of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — the barbarian hordes of Warner Brothers dominate the sequel. Beginning with an animated prologue featuring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, directed by the Warners animator Chuck Jones, “Gremlins 2” abandons Disney’s rural settings for an environment far more congenial to the Looney Tunes ethic, New York City. After more than two decades some of the gags in “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” are still disturbingly topical. Most of the action takes place in a Midtown office tower redolently named “the Clamp Premiere Regency Trade Center,” named after its developer, a certain Daniel Clamp (John Glover), who combines his healthy ego and real estate rapaciousness with some Ted Turner-like tendencies. (His cable network offers “Casablanca” “now in color and with a happier ending.”) Other jokes may require footnotes (Hulk Hogan, anyone?), while others seem eerily ahead of their time. Christopher Lee makes an impeccably timed entrance as a research scientist working on genetically altered Frankenfood.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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