Critters Attack!

• Directed by Bobby Miller
• July 13, 2019 (Fantasia International Film Festival) / July 23, 2019 (home video release)
• Based on Critters by Domonic Muir

While babysitting two teenagers, a college student discovers that carnivorous aliens have landed in the nearby forest.

My expectations for Critters Attack! were low. These were never the greatest but with so many years since the last cinematic installment and with nobody from then apparently involved, this new group coming close to getting it right felt impossible. And I was mostly right.

It’s weird that Dee Wallace returned to the series after only ever appearing in Critters. I know the actor that played Charlie was pushing 70 if not in his 70s when this came out, but he would’ve been a far more logical choice to get than Dee Wallace. Especially with the way her character shows up like Jamie Lee Curtis from Halloween level obsession with the Critters. Canonically Charlie is in the future (30 or so years from this point) but it would have made a better connection since he was largely the face of the series.

The movie feels like something you’re not really supposed to pay attention to. I’m not talking about in a way where you should not think too deeply about the logic of events in the movie but in a way you are not actually supposed to watch. Critters Attack! is more to keep you company when the house or apartment is far too quiet. It is to the point losing your place in this movie is idiot proof. I went to deal with my dogs for a few minutes and came back and was not even a little lost. Zero catch-up time.

Rather than lay obviously alien eggs, the Krites now do some kind of chest burst type thing in corpses. Seems a bit of a change from preestablished lore and one that rips off the Alien films or even the Magog of the cult series Andromeda. This was intended as a soft reboot so I guess Scott Lobdell and Bobby Miller were allowed to pillage other properties for ideas. For more proof in a move reminiscent of A Quiet Place, Critters can now be killed with sound. Airhorns or police sirens cause them to tremble and pop. Why was this never previously mentioned by Ug?

The movie makes wild swings between humor and a lighter tone as well as better gore than Critters 4 ever got into. There are plenty of entrails and blood and moist looking bones. Some of the squirting blood looks like a person just off camera squeezing a bottle to make it shoot out. It is not hard to imagine a person mightily squeezing a condiment bottle.

Critters, right or wrong, has been perceived as a bit of a Gremlins knock off despite what the creator said about the original script being developed before Gremlins. This feels like a knock off of a Gremlins knock off. It adds/changes things like giving them a queen that you could think this was some other movie.

I didn’t care enough about the characters to invest in whether they lived or died or any of the kills. Critters Attack! was just boring. Not enough to put me to sleep but enough for me to mostly tune out. Their personal struggles were annoying and made me interested in seeing the credits.

Critters Attack! is background noise. It’s nice but nothing special. Good enough to break the silence but nothing more.