Saturday, September 6, 2008

Gremlins 2 (1990)--4/5



This is mostly an excuse to promote the new alternate "Gremlins 2" "film break" scene created by Sacha Feiner. Keep in mind that this was reportedly created in two months for less than $5,000.

"Gremlins 2" is having a minor resurgence in popularity, at least in the orbit of sites that I keep up with. Scott Tobias, of The Onion AV Club, recently wrote about it for his New Cult Canon. About a week later, BoingBoing had a post about the new short.

The AV Club piece made special mention of the "film break" scene, posting the original clip and, for good measure, describing it in great detail. To re-rehash, the gremlins stop the film "Gremlins 2" in such a way that the audience thinks that the film they are watching actually has burned in the projector. Before long, the gremlins make shadow puppets in the light and play another movie. Everything is resolved when Hulk Hogan, sitting in the theater, intimidates them into putting "Gremlins 2" back on.

I quickly realized that I had never before seen this sequence. I first watched "Gremlins 2" on VHS at my grandmother's house. (If you'll believe it, I didn't have a VCR until I was twelve.) This being only the second movie I had watched on her brand new VCR, I was justifiably freaked out by the film breaking. Only, it was magnetic tape, rather than film. According to Wikipedia, an entirely new sequence was created especially for the video release of "Gremlins 2." The VHS version mimics the effect of the tape twisting up and breaking into static. The Gremlins do their shadow puppets over this static. The movie is brought back with the help of a John Wayne impersonator.

Sacha Feiner's new "film break" enhances the newfound timelessness of "Gremlins 2." It's almost a shame that he skipped over DVD in lieu of Video On Demand. Every format shift should come with a new version ad infinitum.





Additionally: I found that Bloglines' search had some satisfactory options for Movie-based RSS feeds. I also went to aintitcool.com and brought their feed into Bloglines.

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