Horror Guilty Pleasure No. 135: Critters (dir. by Stephen Herek)

Posted on October 25, 2026 by Arleigh

Some movie monsters want to conquer the planet. The creatures in Stephen Herek’s Critters seem perfectly happy eating their way through whatever happens to be standing on it. There is something refreshing about villains with such uncomplicated priorities, especially when they look like the contents of a clogged vacuum cleaner fitted with shark teeth. This is the sort of movie where the appeal is right there in the premise: nasty little aliens descend on rural America, and a perfectly ordinary family has to survive the visit. As an ’80s genre guilty pleasure, it delivers the goods with an appealing lack of pretension.

The story gets moving when a group of carnivorous aliens escapes from an extraterrestrial prison facility and makes its way to Earth. Their arrival puts the Brown family’s Kansas farm directly in the path of a feeding frenzy, while two shape-shifting bounty hunters follow close behind. Unfortunately, these heavily armed visitors are not especially concerned about keeping the peace or leaving buildings intact. Between the hungry fugitives and their destructive pursuers, an otherwise quiet community gets more excitement than it could possibly need. The setup is ridiculous, but Herek understands that explaining it too much would only spoil the fun.

What gives Critters some substance beneath the silliness is its interest in the people whose evening gets ruined. The Browns are not especially complicated characters, but their everyday disagreements and familiar household routines make them feel like a family rather than a collection of future victims. Spending time with them before the attack also gives the farmhouse a sense of normality worth protecting. The monsters are not simply invading a convenient horror-movie location; they are barging into somebody’s home. That modest distinction helps the film generate more audience investment than its toothy little troublemakers might initially suggest.

Scott Grimes makes Brad an easy young hero to root for. He has enough mischievous energy to seem capable of causing problems before the aliens ever arrive, but he never becomes so obnoxious that his survival feels like an obligation. His resourcefulness grows naturally out of that personality, giving the movie a kid protagonist who can participate in the action without seeming completely detached from his surroundings. There is a pleasing wish-fulfillment element to watching an underestimated youngster step up when things go wrong. Grimes sells that without turning Brad into an impossibly polished miniature action star.

Dee Wallace provides another important source of credibility as Brad’s mother, Helen. She brings warmth and urgency to situations that, described out loud, sound almost impossible to play straight. That commitment helps establish the film’s balance: the audience can laugh at the monsters without feeling that the characters are merely participating in a comedy routine. The family’s fear and concern remain sincere even when the surrounding action gets goofy. Critters does not require powerhouse dramatic performances, but it benefits enormously from actors willing to treat an attack by murderous furballs as an actual emergency.

Naturally, the furballs themselves are the main attraction. They look like what would happen if the Tribbles from Star Trek suddenly decided to stop being cute and start being mean and really, really hungry. Their dark hair, glowing eyes, enormous mouths, and projectile quills turn an otherwise cuddly shape into something you would desperately want off your lap. The fun comes from their rotten personalities as much as their physical design. These are greedy, bad-tempered little creatures whose curiosity usually leads directly to destruction. Their appetite drives the action, but their attitude gives it flavor, making them entertaining even when they are doing little more than looking for their next meal.

The practical effects contribute plenty of charm, although they do not always maintain the illusion. Some movements are stiff, and certain shots make the creatures look exactly like the puppets they are. Still, their physical presence gives the mayhem a satisfying texture. They seem to belong in the same messy environment as the furniture, debris, and frightened actors around them. The movie also benefits from not making them too adorable. They can be funny without losing that unpleasant suggestion of something that might bite straight through your hand. Their limitations are visible, but so is the craftsmanship behind their grotesque little faces.

The bounty hunters bring a broader, more cartoonish kind of entertainment. Terrence Mann plays Ug, who adopts the appearance of rock star Johnny Steele, while his partner Lee cycles through human identities played by Ethan Phillips, Jeremy Lawrence, and Don Keith Opper. Mann does most of the pair’s comedic heavy lifting, giving Ug a wonderfully straight-faced intensity that makes his rock-star appearance and excessive firepower even funnier. Their destructive pursuit suggests that Earth’s rescuers might require almost as much cleanup as its invaders. These scenes provide some welcome absurdity, although they also contribute to uneven pacing. Whenever the film moves away from the farmhouse, the pressure surrounding the Browns tends to ease. The hunters are amusing, particularly Mann, but their antics are not always as engaging as the central siege.

The resemblance to Gremlins is difficult to ignore, but Critters works best when it is not treated as a contest. It offers a smaller, scrappier variation on miniature-monster chaos, with a straightforward survival story holding everything together. The scares are limited, the plotting is thin, and the effects occasionally wobble, yet the movie remains likable because it commits to its own ridiculous appeal. There is no need to pretend it is a neglected masterpiece to appreciate its pleasures. Sometimes a decent creature feature only needs an appealing cast, a little suspense, and some ugly space pests making a spectacular nuisance of themselves. Critters understands the assignment.

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Guilty Pleasure No. 126: Alligator (dir. by Lewis Teague)

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Arleigh

Lewis Teague’s Alligator is exactly the sort of movie that sounds like a bad joke until you sit down with it and realize it is having a much better time than most “serious” creature features. The premise is pure drive-in delirium: a baby alligator is flushed down a toilet, survives in the sewer system beneath St. Louis, Missouri, feeds on discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones, and eventually becomes a gigantic, people-eating urban nightmare. It is absurd from the start, but that absurdity is the movie’s best asset. Alligator is not a good film in the polished, tightly controlled sense. It is too clunky, too broad, and too openly ridiculous for that. But it is never boring, and it understands that a movie about a giant alligator stalking the sewer tunnels under St. Louis should be grimy, nasty, funny, and just a little bit stupid.

The film arrives in that sweet spot between the straightforward animal-attack movies of the 1970s and the increasingly self-aware horror comedies of the 1980s. It has some of the structure of a Jaws knockoff, of course: authorities dismiss warnings, a difficult investigator takes the danger seriously, and a creature grows into an outsized public threat before the final confrontation. But Alligator does not have the resources, atmosphere, or aquatic terror of Spielberg’s film, and to its credit, it does not really pretend to. Instead, it leans into the cheapness of its materials. The alligator is mostly an oversized practical effect, sometimes convincing enough to be threatening and sometimes looking like the kind of thing that should be knocking over miniature buildings in a 1950s monster movie. The difference is that Teague knows how to frame the thing. He keeps the creature partly hidden when that helps, lets the sewer setting do much of the atmospheric heavy lifting, and saves the full ridiculousness of the monster for when ridiculousness is exactly what the audience wants.

There is an immediately appealing trashy logic to the story. The alligator is not simply an animal that wandered into the wrong place; it is a product of environmental carelessness, corporate experimentation, and the city’s tendency to throw its problems underground. The movie opens with a young girl’s pet alligator being flushed away after it bites someone, a cruelly comic act that functions as the film’s entire moral universe in miniature. Humans dispose of an inconvenient creature, neglect the consequences, and then act shocked when the creature becomes a gigantic murderous problem. The idea is broadly ecological and vaguely anti-corporate, but Alligator never becomes preachy. It keeps those elements in the background as an excuse for gore, sewer crawling, and a steadily escalating body count.

Robert Forster plays David Madison, a St. Louis cop with the permanently tired demeanor of someone who has been forced to listen to too many witnesses describe impossible things. Forster is a major reason the movie works as well as it does. He does not play the material like a joke, but he also does not strain to elevate it into prestige horror. His performance is dry, irritated, and completely appropriate for a man investigating missing-person cases that increasingly point toward a subterranean reptile large enough to eat a car. Madison is not a particularly complicated protagonist, but Forster gives him enough weary professionalism that the audience can follow him through the nonsense. His deadpan approach also makes the film funnier without turning it into outright parody.

The supporting cast is a strange, entertaining mixture of familiar character-actor energy and exploitation-movie weirdness. Robin Riker plays Marisa, a reptile expert and Madison’s eventual love interest, and she is better than the role strictly requires. She has a brisk, practical presence, which is useful in a movie where most characters either refuse to believe the obvious or exist to become alligator food. The romance between her and Madison is thin, but it is handled with enough low-key charm that it does not stop the movie cold. It feels like a necessary B-movie ingredient rather than a desperate attempt to convince viewers that they are watching something emotionally profound.

Then there is Henry Silva. Honestly, the presence of Henry Silva alone tells you what kind of movie Alligator is trying to be. Silva plays Colonel Brockman, a professional hunter hired by the evil pharmaceutical company to find and kill Ramon, the giant gator created by its illegal growth-hormone dumping. He is not the mastermind behind the scientific mess; he is the company’s hired cleanup crew, brought in once the whole operation has become too big and too toothy to bury. Silva approaches the role with exactly the degree of swaggering, oily menace it needs. He is here to be Henry Silva in a monster movie, which means glaring, sneering, and acting as though the chance to hunt a massive sewer reptile is simply another profitable afternoon at work. Every time he shows up, the movie gets a little more fun.

The screenplay comes from John Sayles, which is almost comically overqualified on paper, though it makes more sense once the dialogue starts landing. Sayles gives the movie flashes of wit and an edge of social satire that keep it from being totally disposable. There are jokes about cops, politicians, wealthy elites, and corporate corruption, and while none of them are especially subtle, they have the right bite for a film this grubby. The story’s best satirical impulse is its refusal to make the rich and powerful merely unlucky victims of the monster. The alligator’s rampage eventually collides with a wealthy social gathering, and the movie takes obvious pleasure in turning a fancy event into a feeding ground. It is not exactly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in its class consciousness, but it does understand that watching an enormous reptile crash through the polished facade of upper-class respectability is satisfying.

Teague directs with the workmanlike confidence of someone who knows that the material only needs to get from one entertaining set piece to another. The sewer scenes are the film’s strongest visual material. They are damp, shadowy, cluttered, and full of the sort of industrial grime that exploitation cinema loves. The setting is inherently creepy because it is both unreal and plausible: everyone knows a city like St. Louis has tunnels, pipes, forgotten chambers, and places where things can disappear, even if nobody really believes a giant alligator lives down there. The movie uses that unease effectively. When characters descend into the darkness, the tension is simple but real. You know something huge is moving nearby, and you know the special effects are not going to hold up to close inspection, but the atmosphere carries you through.

The attacks are uneven, but that is part of the charm. Some are genuinely nasty, particularly when the movie lets the creature strike suddenly from the shadows. Others are so exaggerated that they become funny in ways the filmmakers likely anticipated. There is a particularly memorable moment involving a child and a swimming pool that has the gleefully tasteless punch of old-school grindhouse horror. Alligator is never as graphic as the nastier exploitation films of its era, but it has enough blood, torn bodies, and monstrous chomping to satisfy an audience looking for low-rent carnage. It knows the basic rule of this kind of movie: if you are going to ask viewers to accept a mutant sewer alligator, you had better let it eat some people.

What makes Alligator last beyond its premise is that it does not seem embarrassed by what it is. There are many creature features that feel apologetic, as if the filmmakers know they are making junk and are waiting for the audience to laugh at them. Teague’s film is junk, absolutely, but it is crafted junk. It has actual pacing, committed actors, useful atmosphere, and a screenplay that occasionally has more on its mind than the average monster-on-the-loose picture. It is bad enough that its flaws become part of the entertainment, especially whenever the huge reptile lumbers into view or the plot makes a leap that only makes sense if nobody involved pauses to think for ten seconds. Yet it is not so bad that it becomes a chore. That is the crucial distinction.

By the time Alligator reaches its climax, it has delivered nearly everything its title promises: sewers, corrupt businessmen, cops with guns, practical monster effects, socialites getting their comeuppance, and Henry Silva looking like he would gladly accept a corporate paycheck to hunt an enormous mutant reptile. It is the kind of film best watched with an appreciation for grime, excess, and the noble tradition of exploitation cinema turning a ridiculous idea into a perfectly decent Saturday-night monster movie. Alligator will not make anyone forget the great creature features, but it earns its place as a scrappy, trashy, oddly lovable B-movie. It is not awful. It is not even truly bad. It is just delightfully cheap, mean, and goofy enough to remind you why bad movies can sometimes be more fun than good ones.

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