Critters Attack! (2019) Review

Critters Attack! (2019) Review

 

I had my mind set on reviewing the Critters franchise for many years, so imagine my surprise when I finally get around to doing it and discover I have more than four movies to review! I thought Critters 4 was the last we would see of the Crites, but 27 years later, along came a fifth one, giving the franchise a chance to end on a less depressing note, or maybe even reboot and continue in a similar way to the Tremors movies. The first Critters epitomized late 80’s/early 90’s little-monster-sci-fi-horror, but apparently, it wasn’t forgotten, because there was also a reboot TV series that came out on Shudder in 2019. Isn’t it weird the franchise sat dormant for almost three decades and then came back with a new movie and new TV show in the same year, but the two aren’t connected? I haven’t seen the series, but it sounds like mostly the same kind of thing as the original movie but without the same charm. The fifth movie, which drops the number five and goes for a generic title, was a TV movie that worked as a reboot as well as a sequel, so I better cover it.

Critters Attack! starts with the Crites arriving on earth and attacking an unsuspecting guy who comes across them. It’s what you would expect, and there are a couple promising things about this opening. The Crites are puppets and look just the same as they did in the other films; the recreated-likeness is quite well done, and in the age of cgi, it’s a commendable effort. This is also the only Critters movie to sport an R-rating, and it has a bit more blood and more gooey exploding Crites. Unfortunately, this sequel-reboot fails to even surpass the abysmal third and fourth films.

As bad as the direct-to-video Critters 3 & 4 were, Critters Attack! doesn’t even look like a real movie, it looks and sounds like a fan film. The production quality is lower than low, and the characters are pathetic. The main character tries to relate to the young kids she is babysitting by talking about YouTube and memes. It’s obvious the writers were trying to make this movie modern and relatable for young viewers, but they just made it more cringe-inducing by trying that. Also, the kids are supposed to be way younger than the age of the actors who are portraying them. None of them are interesting or believable, and you’ll want to see the Crites eat them, but the Crites only kill other ancillary characters in unmemorable ways. Dee Wallace returns for the first time since the original, but she gets barely any screen time and basically fulfills the role of the bounty hunters in the original movie, except we don’t get to see her do anything cool until the very end when she saves the main characters from the Crites with her high tech gun, and even that is lackluster.

The Crites don’t do anything different or special, and they are actually much less menacing than they have been in the past. They only use their back quills a couple times, but they do form the big ball. They chew on people’s legs and the main character actually manages to kick one of them off before it can devour her leg. Not since Critters 3 have they been so toothless. They introduce a new female Crite who looks like the stuffed animal Peepee and is peaceful (until the end), but it doesn’t really do anything and doesn’t make the movie any better—and that’s basically how I can sum up this whole movie: it doesn’t really do anything for the franchise.  

Critters Attack! is a pitiful attempt to revive the Critters series. Despite a little bit of fun exploding-alien-action and appealing practical effects, the boring characters, dull storyline, and lack of explicit gore make it worse than the fourth movie in certain ways, though ultimately it’s slightly more watchable. I hope they leave the Critters franchise alone from now on.    

For the next series in Sequel-a-Thon we’re going back to the 1970’s, and I am going to re-examine a movie I reviewed back in the fourth year of Clayton’s Creepy Cinema before delving into its four sequels.