PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Stephen Herek’s Critters turns 35 on April 11, 2021. The film follows a group of small but vicious alien creatures called Crites that escape from an alien prison transport vessel and land near a small farm town on earth. They are then pursued by two shape-shifting bounty hunters. The films stars Cujo’s Dee Wallace (read our interview with her here), M. Emmet Walsh (Harry and The Hendersons 1987), and Scott Grimes (Party of Five TV series, ER TV series). I love Critters so much! It’s super fun and very funny as well. It is the perfect film to sit down to and just have a good laugh. Enjoy our top 10 fun facts about Critters!
Top 10 Fun Facts
1) Charles Chiodo based the design of the Crites on the Looney Tunes character, Taz the Tasmanian Devil.
2) Corey Burton, who voiced the Critters, also came up with their language, which he described in interviews as combining elements of French and Japanese.
3) There is an E.T. (1982) doll in Brad’s room. Dee Wallace (Helen) starred in E.T., again playing the mother of a boy who comes in contact with aliens.
4) The logo on the back of the bowling uniforms is a parody of the iconic Ghostbusters (1984) emblem. The colors of the uniform match the colors of Egon Spengler’s uniform in The Real Ghostbusters animated series.
5) When the Critters are destroying the bedroom, one comes across the E.T. toy and devours it. This adds to the satire of the film, referencing and homaging Hollywood’s monster boom with films like Gremlins (1984), Ghostbusters (1984), and Ghoulies (1985).
6) This is the second movie (the other being E.T.) with Dee Wallace in which her on-screen son heats up an oral thermometer in order to appear sick to avoid going to school. In E.T., she is fooled, but doesn’t buy it at all second time around in Critters.
7) Grovers Bend, the town where most of Critters takes place, is a nod to the infamous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds by Orson Welles. The broadcast reported that aliens were landing in Grovers Mill and was performed so well that thousands of listeners believed the fake news report was true. Residents in the area panicked and, mistaking a water tower for a UFO, shot it to pieces. The broadcast is about aliens landing in a space craft and then attacking humankind, just like the plot in Critters.
8) The sequence of the Critter swallowing a cherry bomb was controlled by puppeteers who were positioned below in a hayloft to operate the stomach and eye movements. Crew member Dwight Roberts commented that it took some effort to coordinate the Critters’ bulging stomach and eyes as it kneeled over in the hay due to the number of people needed to articulate it.
9) Although promoted as New Line’s answer to Gremlins (1984), the screenplay had been written and bought before Gremlins was announced. Director Stephen Herek had based the screenplay on a nightmare he experienced as a child long before Gremlins was even conceived.
10) The alien laser sound from the Critters’ ship sounds like the Laser Blaster from the AT Walkers from Star Wars.
