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I make the illogical logical.
-Hoyt Axton in Gremlins
Joe Dante's movies just tickle me, and there's more pure pleasure in his new one, Gremlins, than in anything else out there at the moment. Dante mixes elements from dozens of his favorite old American films (chiefly It's a Wonderful Life and Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and serves up a gleeful stew of comic horror-fantasy entertainment that keeps taking unexpected swerves.
Dante is a wry jokester who's also passionate about movies-other people's and (unmistakably) his own. With The Road Warriors George Miller, he's one of the few new directors whose film sense doesn't owe anything to TV-not even to the pummeling mutations spawned by commercials and Music Video. Like his mentor Steven Spielberg, Dante (a budding comic book artist in his youth) has the "movie eye." His images are dense, warm, and mobile; they're alive on the big screen. What makes Dante unique is that he combines this gift with a playful parodistic wit. He seems to make his movies and the Mod magazine parodies of them at the same time. He's turned self depreciation into a weird new form of fun.
Viewers who place a premium on neatness probably preferred Miller's slam-bang fourth episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie (with John Lithgow as a terrorized airline passenger) to Dante's wildly ambitious third segment, which put us right inside the brain of a cartoonfixated ten year old. Miller's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" did one thing supremely well; when compared with a single-minded pro like Miller, Joe Dante can look downright scatterbrained. But his romping imagination gives us more to watch.
Dante's episode, "It's a Good Life," was a garish conceptual fantasy that tried all sorts of things. It asked, "If a spoiled child had the power to re-fashion his environment, what environment would he select-and what would it be like to live there?" This kid (Jeremy Licht) used his terrifying psychic powers to exact a straight junk-food diet and to redecorate his house in the style of his (and Dante's) favorite Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons. Makeup effects wizard Rob Bottin (The Thing) was commissioned to create cartoon monsters patterned on the Big Daddy Roth model kits of the Sixties, with huge lolling tongues...