Word: gremlin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg's slam-bang sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, a man's heart is ripped out of his chest in a ritual sacrifice, and he is lowered alive into a pit of molten lava. In Gremlins, a fantasy co-produced by Spielberg and directed by Joe Dante, a boy's cuddly, otherworldly pet spawns a generation of vicious creatures that, in one scene, terrorize the boy's mother in the kitchen. She retaliates by churning up one gremlin in a food processor and exploding another...
...movie's wildest, wittiest sequence, the gremlins invade a neighborhood bar and turn it into Porky's Goes to the Star Wars Cantina. As Leading Man Galligan describes the scene, "They pick their noses, they snap their fingers, they drink lots of beer. One gremlin in a raincoat is a flasher. There's a Jennifer Beals gremlin who breakdances. Five gremlins play poker; one of them accuses another of cheating and another shoots him dead with a gun. They are little satirists, walking parodies of humanity." The sequence suggests ingenuity rampant on a field of lunacy. There...
Well, no. The gremlins really are an army of latex-skinned puppets devised by Special Effects Maven Chris Walas (Piranha, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and assembled for a bargain-basement $1.3 million. (By contrast, Carlo Rambaldi's E.T. creature alone cost $1.5 million.) The greenish-brown monsters, standing 23 in. tall with their 10-in. bat ears, were controlled by hands, cables, rods, radio signals and a simple but effective method that Walas describes as "throw-'em-across-the-room puppetry." The most complicated gremlin had 60 cables operated by a dozen technicians standing...
...Every shot required different gremlins," Walas says. "We created twelve versions of Gizmo, and 14 Stripes, each used in a different closeup or for a specific movement or to express a new emotion. One gremlin had to be able to inhale and exhale cigarette smoke. Another had to throw dishes at Billy's mother, and another had to ride its skateboard through the department store. With all the rewriting of the script during production, we were making puppets until the last days of shooting...
Together, the Jeep, the Alliance and a new sister car, the Encore, are finally giving AMC a broader appeal. Previous offerings, like the gremlin-plagued Gremlin and the Pacer, consistently missed that target. The well-built Alliance is also countering the legacy of another AMC albatross: poor quality. Indeed, the company's total sales could rise from last year's $3.3 billion to $4 billion in 1984, a lofty height never attained...