Hellzapoppin'!: The Infernal Comedy of Joe Dante

At the climax of Joe Dante's 1985 Explorers, the big-eyed, pretty suburban children who have for a dreary hour and a half been constructing a functioning spacecraft out of junkheap scraps, based on dream-vision blueprints, finally come face-to-bug-eyed-face with the benevolent alien beings that have assisted from afar. The encounter with alien intelligence is not a moment of spiritual or intellectual transcendence like 2001 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The creatures aren't E.T. They're not Starman. They're not even Mac & Me. They're gibbering morons, brains utterly melted by constant inundation by Earth television signals. The aliens babble soundbites from movies and TV and radio, spout impersonations and seem seized by full-on pop culture epileptic spasms.

It's a nasty trick. It's a children's film full of stale concepts of wonder being suddenly deflated with cynicism, and disappointment. As a joke, it does not play: it's not funny. As satire though, it is prime cut Joe Dante. He uses his entire film to backhand bitch slap one scene in E.T., where Elliot briefs his magical alien visitor on Earth culture by showing him Star Wars toys and a plastic peanut-shaped piggy bank. Explorers is to E.T. what Marxist tract How to Read Donald Duck is to Carl Barks comics. It's like expecting to pass through the 2001 star-gate, and instead being relentlessly battered with a fistful of Harvey comic books.

If you were enjoying Explorers up to the spaceman encounter, more power to you. If the prolonged media montage assault, edited to reference avant-garde film by slicing up public domain cartoons, wrecks it all for you... more power to Dante.

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Moment: Microwave Marge battles Daffy, Lenny and George, the set of her cable TV cooking show transformed into an apocalyptic battleground. The Gremlins fling a frying pan at Marge's face, and when she pops back into frame, two gigantic sunny-side up eggs are covering her eyes. She screams and falls over. Deleted scene, Gremlins 2: The New Batch DVD. My friend Paul Rust turns to me and says "that is the funniest joke in all of movie history. You could show that to anyone, from any culture, in any time period, across the universe - even any alien lifeforms - and they would think that's funny."

I am unable to disagree.
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So much of what makes Dante's movies his own - what constitutes his cinematic style and themes to which he returns - are the very things that prevent them from soaring as genre exercises. Checklist: Dropped-in, but fully-committed Warner Bros.-cartoon-style sight gags, sound effects, physics. Incongruous movie and TV parodies, references, swipes which apparently go nowhere after basic recognition. Cloaked sociocultural satire, not nestled as morals, lessons, or asides within innocuous family films, but fully pressing and yanking at the very seams of the films' fabric. Joe Dante sticks it to the way movies work, and the way we watch them, the way we love them, and the way we let them colonize our imaginations.

"Anarchic" is the to-watch adjective for today's Joe Dante Blog-a-Thon. It's sometimes misapplied to Dante's work when writers really mean "frantic" or "crowded with gags" or even "hysterical". Anarchy is not in his attempt to capture the kinetic energy or anything-goes humor of Tex Avery (though he often does). It's in the way Dante is willing to undermine, undercut, and explode anything, even the dramaturgical integrity of very film he is making. Why? That's why it's anarchy.


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Moment: Billy Peltzer runs into the Kingston Falls YMCA, hot on the trail of the most vicious of the new-hatched Gremlins. And he sees the swimming pool.

Because the rules of this fantasy have been so cleanly established (the monsters multiply at the touch of water)...
Because it asks the audience to imaginatively play "what would happen if this took place in your town? Where is the worst place a Gremlin could go?"...
Because the film is set at Christmas time, it may be an extended It's a Wonderful Life parody... and it means any small, local bodies of water would be frozen solid...
Because this is followed by the otherworldly, poetic image of the YMCA pool suddenly at a rolling boil, lime green light spilling from the frothing, seething water...
Because in the middle of it all is a single, hilarious cutaway shot of Stripe holding his nose as he cannonballs to the bottom of the deep end...

Because of this, Stripe leaping into the pool in Gremlins (1984) is the greatest, most perfectly realized example of a staple moment in our collective film vocabulary, the Oh. SHIT Moment.
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The monsters in Gremlins are born ready to imitate Bogart and scenes from Flashdance. There are days when these unfunny gags break the contract for me, and spoils Chris Columbus' otherwise pitch-perfect extended sick-joke holiday movie. Some days I think they aren't supposed to be funny, but in a way repeat the explanation of why the zombies in Dawn of the Dead want to go to the shopping mall: "They're us, that's all." What finally undoes these monsters, themselves metaphors for our own self-defeating technological dependence? A firebomb in a movie theater, where the creatures have willingly trapped themselves. "What are they doing?," Kate Beringer asks. "They're watching Snow White," Billy marvels. "And they love it!" Even mischief incarnate is undone by Disney cultural imperialism. In Gremlins 2 they're busy wasting time parodying Busby Berkeley, and are melted by a superteam of pop culture references from Grandpa Munster to Rambo III.

What makes Gremlins climax more than a hatchet job on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? What redeems Dante's world, in which children's action figures are functioning war machines (Small Soldiers), and the power of cartoons to dominate a kid's imagination portrayed as a terrifying force of destruction and enslavement (Twilight Zone: The Movie)? Answer: with the same heart, burning in anger against all this junk culture, Joe Dante loves this stuff. Loves it all.

The man wrote for Castle of Frankenstien. He's overflowing with love for '50s sci-fi movies, monster movies, Looney Tunes, and all that adored by 14-year-old boys everywhere... especially when it doesn't match the genre. When's the best time to give Chuck Jones a cameo, or swipe images from his "Feed the Kitty"? Probably a monster movie. When's the best time to include appearances from Robot Monster's Ro-Man or The Man from Planet X? Definitely a Looney Tunes movie.
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Moment: Dick Miller driving a cab in InnerSpace.

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Those strange, incongruous "jokes", funny or not, are part and parcel of not just the Dante aesthetic, but of his message itself, and his career-long meditation on our complex relationship with popular media. Sadly, the surface and form often prevent much critical examination beyond how funny a given film was.

It is my sincere hope that the Dante 60th Birthday Blog-A-Thon, hosted by Video WatchDog impresario Tim Lucas, will go some ways to celebrating the bumpy, nutty surface of the man's films, but also sucking out the bitter caramel inside.

Happy birthday, Joe Dante. Here's egg in your eye.

For more Gremlins reading, click here for my review of George Gipe's novelization.

A Pox On Morgturmen!: George Gipe's GREMLINS Novelization

A novel by George Gipe
Based on a screenplay by Chris Columbus
Avon Books, 1984

"When you're a thousand miles from nowhere
And there's nothing below but the drink,
It's then you'll see the gremlins,
Green and gamboge and gold,
Male and female and neuter,
Gremlins both young and old.
White ones will wiggle your wingtips,
Male ones will muddle your maps,
Green ones will guzzle your glycol,
Females will flutter your flaps,
They'll freeze up your camera shutters,
They'll bite through your aileron wires,
They'll bend and they'll break and they'll batter,
They'll jab toasting forks in your eyes..."
-Murray Futterman's Song

And yes, Mr. Futterman sings to Billy, as they drive to the bank in his snowplow.

Gremlins the novel starts with a quiet scene, but the information it contains is a bang: we learn in the first chapter, via narration from inside Gizmo's brain, that Mogwai are from outer space. They're a species engineered long ago on the planet Enz by a being named Morgturmen. They were then dispersed to every planet that could sustain life.

"... the galactic powers ordered the Mogwai sent to every inhabitable planet in the universe, their purpose being to inspire alien beings with their peaceful spirit and intelligence and to instruct them in the ways of living without violence and possible extinction. Among the planets selected for early Mogwai population were Kelm-6 in the Poraisti Range, Clinpf-A of the Beehive Pollux, and the third satellite of MinorSun#67672, a small but fertile body called Earth by its inhabitants."

Hooray! Anyone inaugurated into the alternate-universe of popular movie novelizations knows their weird pleasures. Novelizations, because of their aim to adapt a 100 page screenplay into 300 page paperback, invariably without the aid of a finished film to refer to, inevitably end up expanding the story in deadline-averting ways. A) invented scenes and subplots for minor characters, B) character backstory and internal monologues fabricated whole-cloth, and C) heavy prose reliance on unexpected extended metaphors.

Gremlins has extra work to do, since it's evident George Gipe probably had the shooting script from which to work, and a large amount of business in Joe Dante's film must have been improvised on the set or pages were changed late in production. Specifically, all the comedy business cartoon gags and Gremlins playing dress-up moments in the sequences in Dorry's Tavern and the movie theater are nowhere in the adaptation. I'm personally interested in what happens to the story without these gags. The story becomes more blackly humorous, closer to the tone of Chris Columbus' earlier screenplay drafts. For me Dante's cartoon sound effects, slapstick and pop culture reference jokes never mesh with his movies but strike them at oblique angles, and sometimes ruin them. Anyway, all big fans of the Flashdance Gremlin will be sorely disappointed with this book.


What's funny about the book: Gipe is prone to adjective abuse and is especially fond of describing facial features as "expressive." Billy has "a wide expressive mouth." Gizmo has "huge brown expressive eyes." Expression being their primary function, it is a good thing so many faces are expressive. Not, however, that one can blame young Peltzer if "Billy like so many other young men - and older men too, for that matter -- had fallen madly and totally in love with Kate Beringer the first time he laid eyes on her." Just take a gander at Kate's "flashing green eyes and dazzling dark hair" (aren't Pheobe Cates' eyes brown?).

If it seems unkind to pick on a guy with such task, it must be said: the Gremlins novelization actually improves some story problems of the film. Hoyt Axton gives such a warm, engaging performance as Billy's father, Rand Peltzer, that it's always seemed a shame that he disappears from the picture a third of the way through. Likewise for Mushroom the dog, whose hilarious and star-making turn as Barney steals the whole movie, but is barely on screen once the mayhem begins. Gipe fixes this, and allows Rand and Barney to feature in the department store chase finale... with Rand weilding his Bathroom Buddy invention! I can't say if any script drafts had such a fun payoff for the Bathroom Buddy, but bless Gipe for realizing the throwaway gag's unused potential.

The Gremlins novel is also deftly exploits the story's themes of technology gone haywire. Repeatedly human endeavor is foiled by its own cleverness and irresponsible application. Gipe seems to understand this theme even more than the filmmakers, and that the Gremlins themselves are this metaphor made flesh, not generic demons. The climax, where the Gremlins run amok through Kingston Falls, is narrated mostly by radio reports (we miss the gag about the monsters eventually overrunning the DJ booth!), and are a catalog of inventive technological mayhem. A particular favorite scene is Kate locked in battle with the user-unfriendly lighting and sound system control panel at the department store, cross-cut with Billy and Stripe engaged in physical combat.

Some other shuffling doesn't work quite as well - Kate's sick joke anti-Christmas monologue is relocated to a less effective moment, for example, and the opening chapter being narrated by Gizmo makes his entrance less magical. This loss is not balanced out by many paragraphs devoted to detailing how, why, and under what circumstances Gizmo will eat rubber washers, wood and foam packing peanuts.

Where Gipe comes close to the deep-end is expanding the lives of supporting characters. The Mogwai's jaw-dislocating space opera backstory is even more elaborate and epic than I've outlined, and Gipe tries to use it to justify a lot of how Gizmo and the Gremlins behave in the movie. It doesn't quite work- it's just too weird. The Mogwai, for example, pass on some information about their species through a type of genetic memory, but not others: Stripe knows he can transform, but isn't sure how to do the trick.

A lot of supporting cast are paid inordinate attention only to be dumped from the story. Billy's underage buddy Pete (portrayed by Mr. Corey Feldman in the film) has his hero-worship of Peltzer expanded and focused into thinking Billy can help him learn dealings with the fairer sex. And while the book makes Pete more responsible for the birth of the first Gremlin, (Chapter Eleven's entire, ominous text reads: "Pete forgot."), it also denies him much of anything to do - he no longer battles Christmas-light-dangling Gremlins with a pair of scissors.


High school biology teacher Roy Hanson is surprisingly filled-out:

"The first black instructor at an exclusive private school in the country, he had left there three years ago to become only the second black teacher in Kingston Falls. Now, at thirty-four, he was recognized as one of the best biology and natural science instructors in the area. Tall and stockily built, he was a teacher with whom few students messed..."

I have no idea why we need to know this about Pete's science teacher, but I am glad I know so much about the history of the Kingston Falls school system. We will later learn a lot about the city council and the YMCA (it had a typewriter stolen in the last year!)


We meet Lynn Peltzer, Billy's mother, in the kitchen appropriately enough. Perhaps Gipe felt the character a bit underwritten. I can't disagree. But in order to foreshadow her determination in the spectacular, show-stopping gross-out sequence that is Gremlins' Kitchen Scene, Gipe makes us privy to Lynn's thoughts as she fantasizes about what life would be like if she had joined the Army!

It's fairly well implied that the crotchety town drunk, Murray Futterman (Dick Miller), is crushed to death by his snowplow in the movie. That Mr. Futterman is revealed to have survived the attack is partly a joke about sequels and a funny way for Dante to get his favorite character actor into Gremlins 2. But in George Gipe's novel, Mrs. Futterman is called to the coroner to identify her husband's body. The scene before Futterman is murdered is a strangely harrowing battle, in which Futterman has WWII flashbacks as he holes up in the garage and takes sniper shots at Gremlins who are futzing with his TV antenna. And in this terrifying situation and half-hallucination, Futterman has not felt more at-home or alive in years. It's pretty much the difference in tone: Gipe's book is a little less funny, a little more sadistic, but finally it cares about its characters inner lives a little more.