'GREMLINS'.......SPIELBERG HATCHES THE PG-13.....PART ONE

Gremlins (1984)   In a career dotted with landmarks, Steven Spielberg may have achieved his most historical cinematic accomplishment with the two films he released in the summer of '84......this one, which he produced and Joe Dante directed, and his own produced and directed "Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom"........

              Both were rated PG and remain so today.......even though together, they touched off a storm of controversy among parents appalled at the levels of  violence and gore in both films.

              The result? The creation of the PG-13 rating.....in which filmmakers could now work in a few more dead bodies and blood, a little more skin from the starlets.....and even, if screamed out in the heat of anger, the F-Bomb....(as in "Why the f*** did you kill my whole family?!!")

              "Gremlins", which we'll look at first, seems an odd film to blame for the instigation of the PG-13......since the bulk of its violence is inflicted not on flesh and blood people, but on animatronic puppets. The dealbreaker for parents of easily upset kids:  the kitchen showdown between the film's Mom figure (Frances Lee McCain) and the grems, with McCain popping one into the microwave until it bursts into green goo. And that sequence merely kicked off a whole variety of Gremlin exterminations, including creatures stabbed, burned alive and blown to shreds.....

                Director Dante and writer Chris Columbus freely tapped into the gleeful sadism that all kids since the dawn of Toys R Us have exhibited when playing with their action figures.......but for some folks, the shock of seeing this jokey, cavalier carnage played out in a film was a little too much. You can think of Frances Lee McCain hitting High Power on the microwave as the moment of conception for the  PG-13......

                Watching the film again, we found it strangely stand-offish and ambivalent in regard to the human casualties........we're not sure how many people bite the dust in the Gremlin apocalypse.....the editing artfully dodges around, leaving their fates unclear.   Depending on your outlook on life, you can either believe most the town's population has been maimed, mutilated or eaten.....or escaped with minor injuries. (Although we're pretty sure the high school science teacher and the town Wicked Witch took the dirt nap after their Gremlin encounters.....)

                  This puppet massacre, as it turned out, served as only one of the parents of the PG-13 rating........if "Gremlins" was the mother of the PG-13, the father was surely Spielberg's Indiana Jones sequel.....which we'll cover in an upcoming post.  As for "Gremlins", we still love those that those little guys were brought to life by old school mechanical artistry as opposed to today's real but ultimately unreal CGI. We'll microwave 4 gooey stars (****)....and yet it stays a PG!