Gremlins 2 tries not very successfully to get around the fact of being essentially the same film as its predecessor. It adds a few inventive twists and ups the scale of things, introducing more technically elaborate and a wilder variety of gremlins, but never manages to disguise this single fact. It is eventually done in by its own silliness. The first film stripped almost anything resembling a plot away to the point that it was just a string of gremlins gags. One would think that there would be no ceiling on how far over-the-top a film like this could go, but Dante proves that there is. Dante allows the gleeful malice of the first film to go totally gonzo – he turns it into an anything-goes screwball comedy. When it comes to scenes with the gremlins interrupting the screening of the film and a theatre manager played by Paul Bartel having to call upon wrestling mega-star Hulk Hogan sitting in the audience to threaten them into submission; or gremlins slaughtering film critic Leonard Maltin as he is in the process of dismissively reviewing the first film; and Bugs and Daffy playing about over the credits – there is no sense of reality to the film anymore.

Rick Baker’s gremlins are technically ingenious and far more vicious than ever before. However, one gets the feeling that the film’s technical flourish has gotten in the way of the gags. Some sequences – the gremlins filling an entire lobby singing New York, New York, the spider gremlin, one that shoots electric bolts, another turning into a stone gargoyle – seem only there so that the technical people can show off. There is nothing in this film that comes with the giggly malicious, slam-bang farcical pace that the first film did. Moreover, while the first film bit into the underside of the wholesome Family Values of Spielberg and E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), this seems to have brought into them. There is a mild and rather clumsy degree of satire aimed at big business – John Glover’s rather silly performance is intended as a parody of Donald Trump – but the film, after supposedly waving its fist at it, ends with Billy buying into it and allowing himself to be appointed as design consultant to Clamp’s redevelopment of Kingston Falls. It’s harder to think of a more conservative reversal of the malice that the first film so enthusiastically celebrated.

Director Joe Dante has also made:– the original Piranha (1978); the werewolf spoof The Howling (1980); the third episode of the anthology Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983); Explorers (1985), probably his best film about backyard teen inventors; Innerspace (1987), a parody of Fantastic Voyage (1966); episodes of the comedy skit anthology Amazon Women on the Moon (1987); the urban paranoia black comedy The ‘Burbs (1989); Matinee (1993), a homage to filmmaker William Castle; The Second Civil War (1997); Small Soldiers (1998), a film about warring toy soldiers that disappointingly imitated Gremlins; the toon film Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003); and The Hole (2009). Dante also created the delightful smalltown paranoia tv series Eerie Indiana (1991-2), and produced the genre series’ The Osiris Chronicles (1998) and Jeremiah (2002-4), as well as the film adaptation of the comic-book The Phantom (1996).