The original already had a little bit of that sly humour, and a hint of that sarcastic tone, but is still at its heart an actual horror movie. _The New Batch_ though changes it up and has that light-hearted, hokey, meta-humour in spades. It's a comedy. But it doesn't suffer for it, _Gremlins 2_ is an absolute joy.
_Final rating:★★★½ - I really liked it. Would strongly recommend you give it your time._
"Gremlins 2: The New Batch" leaves you wondering what sort of audience this chaotic visual smorgasbord is aimed at. It is undoubtedly too violent in certain places for a pre-teen audience and it is much too fanciful and juvenile for a teenage audience. In any case it is very entertaining in its own shambolic way as the loosely constructed story strings together one unrelated set piece sequence after another. The gremlins themselves are particularly fearsome and frightning looking little critters - sorry, wrong franchise - and the film can be surprisingly gory in places as well, although it does manage to conjure up a relatively inventive way of ridding the Clamp building of the marauding gremlin menace and this ending neatly bookends what is essentially an extraordinarily nonexistant story in between.
This was really bad! It was great to see Robert Picardo and John Glover in a film before they were famous so that was fun. But this film really felt like "hey we had a good idea in the first film, let's try another one". They started well not trying to reuse the old film's story but after the started felt like they had nowhere to go let's just have everything go wrong and then poof ... Just hoping the next one is better!
