Critters is not what most would call a classic horror franchise. For most people, it's hardly worth mentioning as anything more than an anecdotal Gremlins ripoff in the same horror/comedy vein as Ghoulies, Munchies, or even Leprechaun or the first Troll movie. But for whatever reason, I've always found a certain country charm in those first two Critters adventures and still hold them up as some of my favorite b-movie horror flicks from the '80s. So when the reboot machine finally came for the Krites, I was absolutely ready to dive back into this series. Besides, it can't be any worse than the last two sequels we got can it?
Now I get that your expectations should be pretty low when you're talking about a made for SyFy requel touting the return of Dee Wallace as it's biggest draw but come on, I don't understand how the Critter puppets made 30 years ago look better than the ones in 2019? They're not as bad as the ones seen in the recently released streaming series The New Binge but they still look like something a bad Halloween store threw out in the dumpster instead of packing up for next year. Just plain awful. The worst has to be the white haired helpful critter, who befriends our protagonists and basically spends the entirety of the film stuffed into a backpack looking like a Tickle Me Elmo that survived a nuclear blast.
But Critters have never really been all that scary in the first place. It was more the gruesome aftermath of the feast they left behind that was intimidating. But there's not a ton of that here either. Again, if it's made for tv I understand you can't really turn it into an all out bloodbath but there's absolutely nothing here other than green nickelodeon slime every time a Critter inexplicably explodes. It feels very PG-13. And even more frustrating than the lack of gore is the eye roll inducing attempts at humor. Somehow it manages to be even worse at generating laughs than scares.
The previous installments don't exactly have the richest history to draw from, but it would have been nice to have a little more than a Dee Wallace appearance to tie this back to the original movies. It was cool seeing E.T.'s mom but having her as a bounty hunter was pretty out of place. Especially with the way she clearly struggled hauling that enormous prop gun around. You don't necessarily need to drag Don Opper or Terrence Mann back into the fold (although, it seemed really odd that this was the first Critters movie without Opper's Charlie involved) but not having any bounty hunters on the scene other than Aunt Dee was a huge letdown. The thing that always made the Critters series stand out to me was how it embraced the bonkers sci-fi elements and for some reason Critters Attack takes a more grounded approach to furry space creatures.
But as underwhelming as the Critters were in this movie, it's the humans that make this movie an absolute chore to finish. And it's not the performances either. Tashiana Washington and Jaeden Noel are pretty solid with their limited characters and Ava Preston has a charisma that jumps off the screen. But the characters are just so insufferable and poorly written that there's nothing for the viewer to invest in. They're remarkably flat and uninteresting, especially with how much screen time they get compared to the Critters who mostly operate in the shadows. And there's not really any ancillary characters that jump out either, so you're left with a monster movie full of awful looking monsters attacking boring characters you don't really care about. So much for relaunching and restoring any interest in this series...
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