Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Sequels are usually an act of accounting, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch is that rare case of a studio writing a blank check and handing it to a man with a grudge against the very idea of sequels. Joe Dante, granted final cut and a budget three times the original, responds by turning the whole enterprise into a demolition derby. The gremlins relocate from small-town Kingston Falls to Clamp Center, a Manhattan skyscraper of glass, escalators, and corporate self-regard, and the film proceeds to take the building apart floor by floor, gag by gag, with the enthusiasm of a child who has been told the toys are his to break.

The target is corporate appetite. Daniel Clamp, a billionaire media owner with a chin-first smile, is a clear sketch of the moguls of the age, and his tower is a monument to consumption: a food court, a genetics lab, a cable channel, all stacked in the same building and all equally disposable. The satire lands, though it never lectures. Dante is a prankster, not a pamphleteer, and the film has no interest in telling us what to think about the world it mocks. It would sooner drop a mutated gremlin into the telephone system and let the audience sort out the metaphor.

Which brings us to what the film declines to do. Its concerns are anarchy, parody, and the Looney Tunes tradition of the well-aimed anvil. Kate and Marla exist as capable women without the film making an argument about them. The cast is white to a person, with the few nonwhite performers confined to comic business. There is no engagement with race, no environmental sermon, no discussion of the body or the mind. It is a picture built from id and craft, and it has aged into something oddly pure.