Joe Dante’s pointedly cynical Gremlins 2: The New Batch contains some of the most ingenious fourth wall breaking ever conceived.
Deadpool & Wolverine may perhaps be the highest-grossing film ever to break the fourth wall – that is, shatter the invisible barrier between the audience and the actors on the screen, who traditionally are supposed to pretend that nobody’s watching. But while Ryan Reynolds’ winks to his viewers and irreverent, self-referential jokes are part-and-parcel of both the Deadpool character and the franchise as a whole, the practice of breaking the fourth wall has been a staple of cinema for over a century.
Yet while numerous movies have brought their stories to give a knowing look to the audience, few have broken the fourth wall as creatively as Joe Dante’s 1990 sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch. A sequel to his own festive horror comedy, 1984’s Gremlins, the movie was one director Joe Dante famously never wanted to make – he only relented when its studio, Warner Bros, allowed the director to have complete creative control over his sequel.
What happens when one of Hollywood’s most mischievous filmmakers gets a blank cheque? You end up with Gremlins 2: a sequel that openly mocks the premise of its predecessor, takes deadly aim at profit-for-its-own sake capitalism and opportunistic studios, and gleefully throws in cameos, references and daft jokes all based on Dante’s love of classic movies. Christopher Lee shows up as an archetypal mad scientist named Doctor Cushing Catheter; film critic Leonard Maltin, who wrote a dismissive review of the original Gremlins, gamely shows up here and is promptly attacked by – you guessed it – a gang of gremlins.
There are also animated Looney Tunes sequences, more than one song and dance showstopper, John Glover as a Donald Trump stand-in who’s even more glaring today than he was 34 years ago, and so many mutant gremlins that it’s difficult to imagine anyone coming up with more of them. (One of Dante’s aims, it seems, was to make a sequel that so comprehensively messed with the original’s formula that nobody would make a third; to date, he’s succeeded.)
All of which brings us to what might be one of the most brilliant pieces of fourth wall breaking in cinema. In a febrile scene, toothsome gremlins have taken over the Clamp building (clearly modelled on Trump Tower) and all hell is breaking loose. Returning star Zach Galligan’s character, Billy, is trying to talk to Lee’s addled Dr Catheter about what’s going on, when all of a sudden, the entire film breaks down. The celluloid itself melts and the screen turns that weird off-white colour you get when all you can see is the light from a projector bulb.
We then hear a bunch of gremlins cackling; clawed hands begin forming shadow puppets using the projector’s light. The critters have taken over the projection booth, and we hear them laugh again as they proceed to put on an old nudist movie from what looks like the 1950s.
Your humble writer was lucky enough to see Gremlins 2 in a cinema on its release all those summers ago, and I can still remember the audience reaction – murmurs of confusion, followed by titters from parents at the sudden appearance from that old black and white nudie flick (kids like me were mostly just confused…).
When the camera cut to the foyer, and an angry mother castigating the theatre manager (Paul Bartel) over what just occurred, the titters turned to laughter. But when the action moved back into the cinema itself, and wrestler Hulk Hogan leapt from his seat to tell the gremlins to just put the damn movie back on – the reaction was ecstatic. The joke was so bizarre, and so broad, that even younger watchers were swept up in it, or were at least delighted to have Hogan (who was a huge, huge star at the time) stare straight down the lens and address them (“Sorry, folks. It won’t happen again”).
The problem with this whole gag, of course, was that it only worked in a cinema. Knowing this, Dante and his collaborators came up with an alternative scene for Gremlins 2’s home release. In it, the film breaks down not with a melting strip of celluloid, but with a blast of static and glitching that will be familiar to anyone who owned a video player in the late 20th century.
The same gremlin shadow puppet show then plays out (which doesn’t make as much sense in this context, but never mind), before cutting to a pastiche of a classic western. Scenes of a band of gremlin bandits branding a cow are intercut with sequences of John Wayne from the 1970 cowboy flick, Chisum, with actor Chad Everett providing the voice of the late Wayne.
As a piece of comedy, it doesn’t work quite as well as the earlier cinema/Hulk Hogan gambit, but its inclusion speaks to how much care was put into Gremlins 2, not to mention gleeful creativity. Dante could have just cut the theatre scene entirely, or replaced it with a quick crackle of static to affordably make a similar joke; instead, he treats us to an entire shootout between John Wayne and a (wild) bunch of gremlins.
This sense of fun was clearly infectious, because a variation on the joke even made it into Gremlins 2’s novelisation. As written by David Bischoff, the book version of the sequel finds its own way of adapting Dante’s bout of fourth wall breaking.
As in the film, Zach Galligan’s utterance of “Try and calm down – where were the…” is cut off mid-sentence. In the book, however, we learn that the author himself has been tied up and locked in his bathroom, and that the film’s Brain Gremlin (the clever one voiced by Tony Randall) has taken over the typewriter.
“There,” the Brain Gremlin writes (all in italics, so we know it’s an aside), “The noveliser, Mr David Bischoff, Esq, has been successfully waylaid and is now tied up in the bathroom of his Los Angeles apartment. Do not attempt to adjust your book…”
The novelisation then proceeds to point out that the actual film contains a cameo from Hulk Hogan (“I do believe that Kenneth Tobey of The Thing is somewhere in there,” the gremlin adds) as well as throw in a reference to the original movie. It’s an ingenious adaptation of the script’s original joke, and one I had no idea about until Quentin Tarantino, of all people, mentioned it during a Video Archives Podcast discussion about another Dante film, Piranha.
In the book, the Brain Gremlin rambles on grandiloquently for a page or two before the author breaks out of the bathroom and takes over the typewriter again. As a joke, it’s entirely in keeping with the movie itself, while also harking back to another horror tradition – that of HP Lovecraft’s short stories, in which the protagonist would often keep writing about something dreadful coming to kill them, their pen scratching away right up until the precise second they’re slaughtered.
What’s noteworthy about all these silly yet clever jokes is that Warner Bros almost nipped them in the bud. Executives didn’t particularly like the idea of a movie pretending to break down halfway through, and so they tried to talk Dante out of including it; rather than tap a sign that said ‘I have creative control’, the director had a cut of the film screened for a preview audience. Far from getting confused and walking out of the cinema, as execs feared, the crowd loved it.
The other noteworthy thing about Dante’s fourth wall breaking is how of its time it is. If you showed either gag – the Hulk Hogan one or the John Wayne version – to a younger audience, you’d probably spend two minutes watching the scene and then at least ten minutes explaining what’s going on. Who’s the big muscly guy? Why does he tear his shirt off? Who the hell is John Wayne? (As scripted, the theatrical version of the gag would have featured Steven Spielberg, which would probably have confused modern audiences even further. Who’s the guy with the beard and baseball cap?)
Viewers under the age of about 25 will probably never have watched a film on celluloid, and so won’t recognise the weird melting thing that happens when a piece of film gets stuck in a projector (this writer has seen it happen twice, during screenings of The Bodyguard and Patriot Games). Nor are they likely to have seen a movie on VHS, so they won’t be familiar with the monochrome fuzz you get when someone’s taped over recording of Jaws with, say, an episode of EastEnders.
Gremlins 2 is therefore something of a time capsule – both of a specific era in pop culture and also filmmaking technology. Most likely due to poor timing, the movie wasn’t a hit, either – which ensured that, to date, the gremlins haven’t been given a chance to wreak havoc on our screens again. Perhaps that’s for the best, though; Dante and screenwriter Charles S Haas threw just about every zany idea they had at Gremlins 2. It’s hard to imagine a further sequel matching it in terms of pure, fourth wall-breaking imagination.
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