Critters 4

• Directed by Rupert Harvey
• October 14, 1992

After being cryogenically frozen and waking up in the near future on a space station, the Critters begin eating again.

Critters 4 is set largely in the far-off year of 2045 with spaceships and artificial gravity along with the implication of interplanetary travel. It’s amazing how the distant future becomes the very near future or recent past with so many movies. Quickly this takes a much darker tone than the first three films. Like most sequels of the era it is connected to the previous films but can be viewed as a standalone movie.

The change in tone works nicely as does the change in setting. I won’t call it necessarily an improvement but it is a nice way to mix up the Critters feel. It is not completely devoid of humor like the station’s malfunctioning computer which cannot understand requests or does the opposite of what is asked.

Much like the Alien film series, we have somebody with designs on weaponizing an alien species for their own purposes. Like Alien Resurrection this takes place on a station where those experiments are taking place and is about to explode. Rather than xenomorphs it is Krites being fought by a crew of dubious morality. Did Joss Whedon rip this movie off when writing Resurrection?

Angela Bassett and Brad Dourif are in this as pilot Fran and ship’s engineer Al ‘Albert’ Bert respectively. That there is more talent than a direct-to-video release deserves. Anders Hove, best known for the Subspecies series, is the unsettling Captain Rick Buttram who waffles from creepy to pervert to possible rapist. He leads this random crew as they engage in salvage operations which is how they find the preservation pod with the Krites and Charlie (Don Keith Opper). Looks like they just travel the cosmos hoping to stumble across something.

This spends most of its time on sets rather than trying to do things with special effects shots. Wise move because the special effects we do get are just awful. This was so cheap that it even reused footage from the previous movies. The Star Trek: TOS films did that but not so overtly as this.

Characters make some dumb decisions to put themselves in danger or overreact to minor stresses. We have a character getting killed in the most haphazard drug theft ever put to film. He spills  the bulk of the pills on the floor before getting eaten.

Something confused me. Terrance Mann returns as Counselor Tetra who may also be Ug. I could not be sure and nothing Charlie did when he finally joined the story cleared that up. If it was indeed Ug why or when did he go evil? Ug was the stoic friend and a bit of a mentor to Charlie. Stiff but someone you can count on. The change to evil with corporate greed just didn’t work because there was no reason.

The worst part of Critters 4 was having Charlie there just to connect to the previous films. He was poorly integrated into the plot by popping in at random. If he had been removed, the story would’ve proceeded pretty much as it did. There’s also an attempt at an emotional moment between the boy Ethan (Paul Whitthorne) and Albert. Their relationship worked as master and apprentice. There is no demonstration of a paternal connection of any kind yet Ethan seems to mourn his death.

Critters 4 isn’t bad but it’s not great either. If you take some time out to watch it, I don’t think you’ll necessarily be disappointed but after the second one it’s not necessary viewing.