Man, the ’80s were weird for movies. Like, this is rated PG and is a children’s movie[1], and yet you have: 1) people threatening to kill the protagonist’s dog slowly via torture, 2) people throwing Gremlins into microwaves to kill them, 3) and also blenders.

The only way I can really tell that it’s not a true PG-13/R movie is that in the ’80s every movie with those ratings had at least one scene of naked bosoms, because they didn’t yet have ubiquitous HBO.

Other than that, it’s just weird. The kid’s dad is a wacky failed inventor, which matters zero percent except for setting up cheap joke digressions. They buy the mogwai from a stereotype wise old Chinese man, for no reason other than that… I guess it’s more plausible if mogwais come from China? And there’s the scene in which a totally drunk dude is 100% going to drive his tractor back home, and the main characters only laughingly suggest that maybe he should walk home/freeze to death in bushes instead.

Also, there’s like an evil science teacher who is totally 100% irrelevant to the plot, and really when it comes down to it, basically everything is irrelevant to the plot, and on second thought the plot is dumb so maybe this is good.

As ’80s movies for kids go, this definitely is one, and man those were weird days.

  1. though apparently it drove the creation of the PG-13 rating, along with some Indiana Jones thing ↩︎