Movie(s) of the Day: Gremlins 2: The New Batch and Dick Tracy
Another wild weekend at the movies for me, and the kind of thing I needed to focus on during one of the worst years of my life. The weekend was June 15, 1990. It was the summer between 8th grade and high school. I was a month away from turning 14 and my life was falling apart. And that summer, I had ANOTHER friend who decided to just call and tell me he'd decided to stop being my friend. That happened a few times. It sucked.
But hey; I had two of my favorite movies released that weekend. And I went to see them both MULTIPLE times.
As I said a few days ago, I was a gigantic Gremlins fan, so I was very geared up for Gremlins 2. Director Joe Dante had resisted the studio's call for a sequel for years, until he finally able to guarantee creative control. From there, Dante made one of history's perfect movies.
Building on the comedic B-horror homage of the first movie, he went full cartoon with this one. Part parody of the original, part satire of the media, part criticism of the ridiculousness of media moguls (in particular Ted Turner and Donald Trump), part love letter to horror hosts, part Looney Tunes -- there are a lot of moving parts in there -- Dante essentially blows up the Gremlins franchise altogether by using the movie as a powerful jab at the idea of sequels--complete with a musical number! Rick Baker designed the creatures in this one, creating all kinds of different Gremlins who evolve after drinking chemicals in a lab run by a mad scientist played by the great Christopher Lee, my favorite actor. Having all of the different varieties is funny, but is also Dante and Baker taking a jab at merchandising (which partially explains why this movie wasn't merchandised like the first one).
It goes way past camp and into an amazingly zany whirlwind that still never loses sight of its characters. It wasn't the mega-hit Warner Bros. was hoping for (it's still debated whether it actually broke even, but it seems like it didn't). Audiences seemed to mostly reject it because, you know, it wasn't more of the same. But it was better than that. It transcended even the idea of movies.
Dick Tracy, meanwhile, opened on the same weekend. Disney had way too much confidence in this movie, but I'm glad they did. They created a movie that doesn't quite work, but it also amazing. It just has so many interesting ideas. A cartoonish gangster movie based on the incredibly weird and violent Chester Gould comic strip. It looks like a comic, sticking to a four-color comic book palette for its design. The story is broad and arch, very dramatic and over the top. The problem is it can never quite decide if the tone is meant to be kid-friendly or noirish. Madonna as Breathless Mahoney, for example, is so sexy, so sheer, so full of very adult double entendre that she made a lot of parents uncomfortable. You only get this kind of amazingly uneasy tone from a movie that a studio is overly confident about and spends way too much money on.
What this movie really is for me is a fucked-up monster movie. The character make-up by John Caglione Jr. and Doug Drexler is astonishingly good. There was a great creative team in place visually: costume designs by Milena Canonero, visual effects by Harrison Ellenshaw, production design by Richard Sylbert, cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. And because Warren Beatty starred and directed, there is an endless sea of cameos and big names. Al Pacino was nominated for an Oscar for this movie!
This was an excessively-marketed movie in the summer of 1990 considering how unloved it seemed to be (despite being the ninth highest-grossing movie of 1990), and some of the merchandising was good simply because it was so weird. Disney had tried to follow the marketing campaign of Batman and were hoping to make Batman money; ironically, the biggest complaint I remember hearing from people about it was that it seemed like a rip-off of Batman. The Batman campaign had famously turned the Bat Symbol into fashion; that wasn't gonna happen with Dick Tracy.
My favorite tie-in was McDonalds' Dick Tracy Crime Stoppers game.
It was like a needlessly-overcomplicated version of their Monopoly game, but I liked getting all the little tokens. My best friend (not the shitty one who dropped me) and I were at the right age to basically be at the mall all the time, so we ate a lot of McDonald's because we wanted the pieces to this game. We both ended up winning a lot of free fries, Cokes, shakes and burgers that summer, so that was pretty cool. Nothing like being a 14 year-old and getting free fries and a shake after browsing Kay-Bee Toys.
There was a lot of bad that summer, but I had some cool movies to escape to.
As a fun bonus, Dick Tracy had a short playing with it: Roller Coaster Rabbit, the second Roger Rabbit short. I was still obsessed with Roger Rabbit then, so this was also very cool. I'm still sick and irritated that there were only three of these animated shorts, tbh. But we'll always have them, at least.
Fun times in a sea of awful.
