Critters 4 (1992) Review

Critters 4 (1992) Review

 

The fourth Critters doesn’t have an official subtitle, but it does have a couple fun taglines. “They’re invading your space” is the one I’ve seen the most. There is also “In Space…they love to hear you scream” which is an obvious nod to the tagline from Alien. But then there’s this one: “In space no one can smell rotten eggs.” Uh…ok? That’s pretty lame. And as it turns out, that’s probably the one most suited to this sequel.

Oh dear, there's nothing much sadder than a grown man sitting alone in his apartment watching Critters 4. Right away I could tell this movie was cheap, and not in a way that's charming at all. The first twenty minutes are humorless, there are no Crites, just boring characters on a pathetic excuse for a spaceship, and it’s all tedious instead of suspenseful. Charlie comes out of the little space pod he crawled into at the beginning of the movie and discovers he’s in the future, and the Crites are on board. It’s pretty depressing that Charlie is the only character who has been in every one of these movies (and Don Opper gets top billing this time, too). Charlie isn’t exactly a charismatic character, yet he’s always there—in fact he’s in this one more than the last one.

Critters 4 is actually not 100% bad. The acting isn’t awful, and Brad Dourif is in it. He’s good even when the movie he’s in sucks, and he drops the one PG-13 f-bomb they were allowed to use. The character played by Angela Basset punches the creeper captain in the face when he comes into the shower to hand her a towel and look at her naked, which is a fun moment. It feels even sleazier than the nudity in Critters 2, even though we only see her butt. Later, a Crite crams itself into the captain’s mouth and kills him, which is another one of the very, very few entertaining moments.

The biggest problem with Critters 4 is the concept and execution. It’s mainly a bunch of sci-fi space ship clichés, and feels more like a lousy Alien rip-off than a Critters sequel. There’s a part where Charlie and another character are in a trash compactor reminiscent of Star Wars, and it’s moments like these that make it seem as if they had no new ideas. The Crites don’t use their back quills or form the giant ball, but at least they remembered these are intelligent aliens, despite their appearance. After the second and third movies it’s easy to forget the Crites have their own language and flew a space ship to earth in the original. In this one, we get to see some of their intelligence once more, with them trying to send the ship to earth again and growing young Crites into adults in the science lab. If only there had been more scenes like these and less with the dull characters.

The bounty hunter from Critters and Critters 2 shows up at the end as a bad guy, still looking like that rock star who sang “Power of the Night” in the original, and it just feels pointless. If you even make it that far into the movie, you’re a trooper. The pace throughout is really slow, there are few scenes with the Crites, and it fails to be suspenseful. The idea to try making it more about suspense in the fourth movie of a series like this when you have such a silly little monster was one of the worst ideas they could have had.

As a fourth Critters movie, this one is really disappointing, but even if you look at it as just some sci-fi movie that happens to feature the Crites, it’s merely unremarkable. It is painful to get through because it’s just so dull, and for a while there, it seemed the franchise had ended with this rotten egg. But, we’re not done yet…