Critters 2: The Main Course

Critters, you may remember, concerned a group of oversized mothballs from space who landed on Earth and ate everybody, until some intergalactic bounty hunters turned up and fried them. The 'Krites', however, had the good business sense to lay some eggs before getting splattered, so now Grover's Bend is up to its neck in the little buggers again, and the space-borne pest control are back on the job. Garris plays it for laughs, and despite dull moments (and the obvious plagiarisation of Gremlins), does a pretty good job. Massive guns go KABOOM! everywhere as one gribbly after another gets stiffed, each exploding in a fountain of what looks strangely like the green gunk Linda Blair spewed over von Sydow in The Exorcist. The superimposure (particularly at the end when the hero meets his double) is diabolical, and the Chiodo brothers' creations are, as before, both spectacularly silly and disconcertingly vicious as they munch people's vital organs. The effect is perhaps not unlike watching Sooty in a video nasty.