Eleventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 Critters

 I must confess that, after being pleasantly surprised for the most part by my movie selections thus far, I was looking forward to 1986's Critters.  I didn't know anything about it, other than it looked to be a monster-y movie with round, furry, toothy ... critters.

I didn't realize that it starts out in space, on Prison Asteroid Sector 17/Maximum Security.  After some especially low budget alien stuff, the eight Critters (technically, "Crites" in alien-speak) escape from super-max and land on Earth, in a small Kansas town.  Once there, they're hungry.  What do they eat?  Pretty much anything that's meat.  That includes cows, sheriff's deputies and the unlucky boyfriend of the farm girl who lives near the spaceship's landing site.  Said boyfriend is played by Billy Zane, who had hair in 1986.

With some above-average character building, we meet the farm family (mom played by icon Dee Wallace, she of Cujo, The Howling, E.T., The Hills Have Eyes, etc.) and some of the townspeople (sheriff played by icon M. Emmett Walsh), and also the two alien bounty hunters sent from the space prison to retrieve the Critters without causing too much damage.  SPOILER: there's a lot of damage as the bounty hunters like to blow things up.  Also, they're shape-shifters and one of them takes the form of some 80s rock singer, complete with AMAZING 80s hair.  The farm family is tough and resourceful and even though the father gets munched on quite a bit, and the daughter gets dragged back to the spaceship, they - with help from the bounty hunters - put down the Critters.  Even the cat survives the movie!

Now, I didn't love it.  Critters clearly wants to be Gremlins but despite the actors' best efforts, the movie never really clicked for me.  The Critter design is good: furry, roly-poly and VERY toothy, with the ability to shoot venomous spines that paralyze their prey.  I very much appreciated the practical effects but this movie is not at all scary and not even very bloody either.  I am obviously in the minority here, however, as there are a total of five Critters movies: this one, and subsequent films in 1988, 1991, 1992 and 2019!  More power to 'em, I guess.

I've been on a roll recently but now must pause our regularly scheduled programming for a couple days.  We'll pick this back up soon, hopefully with something better for #6.