Critters 2 (1988)

Critters 2: The Main Course arrived in 1988, two years after the first film, and it carries the confidence of a sequel that knows exactly what it is: eighty-odd minutes of puppetry, small-town panic, and Easter imagery deployed for slapstick carnage. Mick Garris, making his directorial debut, keeps the camera low to the ground so the Krites can scurry, gnaw, and multiply. The town of Grover's Bend is white, rural, and unexamined. Nobody in the frame pauses to consider what the demographics might signify, because the film has no interest in signification of that kind. The creatures want to eat. The humans want to survive. That is the entire transaction.

Consider the shape-shifter Lee, who leafs through a magazine and adopts the body of a centerfold model. The film treats this form as a joke and a leer, never as a statement about beauty standards or self-image. A woman in a tank top runs from monsters, and the camera does not editorialize. The climax stages a chase through a burger factory, a location chosen because industrial equipment makes for good explosions, not because anyone wishes to indict the food industry. Easter eggs, a pitchfork, a man in a bunny suit who meets an unfortunate end: these are props in a gag reel. No sermon follows. No lesson is extracted.

The result is a film entirely innocent of the social preoccupations that now structure so much of our cultural conversation. It is crude, silly, occasionally mean, and utterly without an agenda beyond the next scare. Roger Ebert gave it one star and declared it had no reason to exist. He was wrong about the reason, though not about the star count. Its reason is that a man named Charlie flies a spaceship into a giant ball of alien vermin and lives to become sheriff. That is enough. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it repays that attention with puppets and teeth.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]} could not be embedded cleanly, so the classification stands: this is a direct continuation of a prior installment and nothing else in the taxonomy applies.