Critters (1986)

Critters arrives from 1986 with a simple mandate: small furry aliens eat rural Kansans, and two shape-shifting bounty hunters arrive to clean up the mess. The Brown family, mother, father, teenage daughter, younger son, exists as a nuclear unit assembled from creature-feature parts. Dee Wallace performs maternal concern. M. Emmet Walsh performs sweaty law enforcement. Charlie the town drunk mutters about fillings and abductions. The film has no interest in interrogating any of this. It wants to put puppets in a barn, blow up a farmhouse, and send the audience home before the credits roll.

Seen through the lens of contemporary social consciousness, the cupboard is bare. The casting is uniformly white, the gender roles are drawn from a 1950s sitcom, and race never enters the frame as a subject. There is no LGBTQ subtext, no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no body-positive reading, and no neurodivergent framing. Charlie is a comic crackpot, not a case study. History is not revised because history is not engaged. The aliens are not metaphors for climate collapse or late capitalism. They are hungry, they have quills, and they roll into balls when threatened.

To call the film preachy would be a lie. It has no lesson to deliver, no moral to impose, no audience to scold. Its pleasures are practical: puppeteers below a hayloft coordinating a bulging stomach, a Molotov cocktail made from whiskey, a church and bowling alley panicked by blank-faced bounty hunters. The result is a modest, campy diversion with the social awareness of a firecracker. We score it accordingly, with the solemnity such an empty vessel deserves. The only thing it represents is the durable appeal of watching a furball eat a cow.