Just the Ticket #105.5: Bitter - A New Cringe

Happy Post-Apocalypse Day, Ticketholders!

Actually, we are still in the midst of the closest thing that life has yet come to imitating the often-filmed art subject of a zombie apocalypse.

I mean, let's run down the checklist really quick:

Viral Pandemic of suspected, but unknown origin with unprecedented effects on the human population?

Check!

Brain-dead infected people walking around and infecting the rest of us?

Check!

A dangerously sufficient portion of the population ignoring expert advice and thinking it's all a hoax?

Check!

An incompetent world leader spreading disinformation to quell panic?

Check!

Rioting in the streets anyway?

Check!

Brutal, redneck police stereotypes?

Check!

Survivalists looting grocery stores so they can horde supplies?

Check!

Commentaries on unchecked racism and consumerism?

Check!

So, yeah. We're all officially in a real-life approximation of a zombie movie. The good news (at least, the good news for those of you who didn't act like babies and move up north to torture the Canadians when Trump lost the election...which was fairly conducted and reported, and THERE IS NO POINT TO ANY KIND OF A RECOUNT!!!) is that we might have competent leadership next year with a plan to fight COVFEFE-19 and start recovering the economy. By the way, what is it with all of the people who think all Democrats are Socialists and that all Socialists are Nazi Communists? For one thing, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are not the same thing. For another, the only absolutes that life deals in are Stupidity, Taxation, and Death. And finally, if you idiots hate Socialism so much, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU MOVING TO CANADA? Obi-Wan was right; the ability to speak is not a signifier of intelligence.

...

Oh, my god! A bumbling, ignorant, annoying, orange-skinned icon of racism with a barely functional understanding of the English language who attains political power and runs his government into the ground...Is Jar-Jar Binks Donald Trump? Did George Lucas pull a Simpsons prediction out of his ass without realizing it? The world may never know!

But to those of you out there whom I have not yet alienated, I made some progress on the "any way you can" front of watching Critters: A New Binge, which fittingly focuses on unlikeable aliens, and the intolerable humans who must contend with them.

Now that I have forced that segue (and made an unintended Star Wars pun), Critters: A New Binge is a Shudder original, limited streaming series that was meant as a modern reboot of the first film and a pseudo-sequel to Critters 3 (as it and Critters Attack! take place in the recent past, during the 50-something-year time skip that begins Critters 4.

As a reboot, A New Binge does some new things with the lore (such as increasing the Critters' intelligence, differentiating their personalities with articles of clothing, and having them converse with each other more frequently) and uses updated effects. Unfortunately, as a sequel, the new directions taken with the Critters' designs and characters feels unfaithful, and the word "updated" should have sarcastic quotations around it.

After opening with a decently ominous shot of the Earth and a horror-camp title drop, the series cuts to the Critters' ship, which looks like a cross between a closeup of COVID-19 and Chewbacca's hairball from [insert PlayStation-era Star Wars game here]. I mean, I give it points for identifiability; we've never actually seen a full Krite ship in the movies before, as they usually steal another alien race's spacecraft offscreen, but the design of it clearly communicates "this is a Krite spaceship." It's just badly rendered. And speaking of being badly rendered, the Krites are being pursued by two new, faceless bounty hunters in one of the ships from Asteroids 64 via the Millennium Falcon cockpit from Super Return Of the Jedi as designed for the set of Mystery Science Theater 3000. When the audience is done feeling like they've completed level one of Critters: The Movie: The Series: The Game, the Krites have made it to Earth on a rescue mission, and camouflaged their ship somewhere in Iowa. This is where we meet our three main characters: an unlikable fat kid who overeats (plot convenient trait, or twisted foreshadowing?), his lazy, greedy best friend, and his timid crush who can't act. And if you need any more reason to hate A New Binge, the fat kid's uncle is played by Gilbert Gottfried with his annoyance factor turned down to a ten, his mother is a slut, and his principal is the second most omnipresent asshole since Joel McHale: Thomas Lennon (The Odd Couple reboot and most of the recent ABC gameshow revivals). The two boys skip school to visit the girl at the local animal shelter and hear her scream, possibly because she's terrified of her own horrific acting. But no; it turns out the Critters broke in and disemboweled all of the animals, and the fat kid can't act, either. Or maybe the animals disemboweled themselves because they realized what show they were in? Or it was farm equipment? Or the wind? I joke because I don't care.... Meanwhile, the law enforcement in this hacked-up SyFy Hellscape make Carl Winslow and Barney Fife look like Sherlock Holmes. And that includes the two faceless bounty hunters who land in front of a green-screen projection of Australia, steal the faces of two guys who can't hold their accents, and try to run to Iowa. Speaking of the faceless bounty hunters, their morphing effects suck, too. Instead of the nylon face masks and practical morphing effects that the movies used to great...effect, A New Binge uses bad green-screen, glitching holograms, and jump-cuts to achieve noticeably less of a visual impact. The Crites (that's another change from the movies; Krite is spelled with a C now for some reason) eat more people and animals, the morons don't believe them, the twist is made obvious way too early ("Your father disappeared off the face of the planet!," among other doubly intended hints), the bounty hunters arrive conveniently to save the day, but also not to save the day, the sidekicks are abducted, the main character twist is finally revealed, everyone acts like a shallow asshole, everyone gets eaten, the Crites audition for their own Angry Birds spinoff, the fat kid makes them explode because they are suddenly weak to high-pitched noises after four movies of no one ever exploiting this fact, and oh, how cute! They expect to make a sequel to this? That people--no, Critters fans--will like? How is that supposed to happen when the CGI Crites clip through their environment half the time, they look stupid with clothes on, they talk too much, the human characters are incompetent, unlikeable, mostly unfunny, and poorly acted, the plot is scattershot, and almost everything looks cheap and lazy? Though they are not masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, the original films had a distinct style and feeling of genuine charm and effort from all parties involved that made them enjoyable popcorn fare. This series literally can't make it through a hotdog-eating contest without puking and shitting all over itself. Granted, seeing Thomas Lennon in full face-stealer mode, ripping off the rose scene from Terminator 2 was a treat, the Crite ship had a decent design, the twist had potential, and the Critter ball effect from the second movie is arguably created and utilized better here than it was back then (or in Critters Attack!). But what can those four, twinkling stars do to brighten a disastrous shitspace like Critters: A New Binge? Almost nothing.

F+

P.S. & Spoilers: If you didn't figure it out by the few clues above, the reason the mom is considered a slut by some of the characters is that she gets drunk and accidentally gets herself knocked up by aliens, including the Crite President and a faceless bounty hunter who looks sort of like Dax Shepard. So the reason the fat kid is fat and can't stop eating is because he's a human-Crite hybrid, complete with glowing, red eyes, razor-sharp teeth that look like they were ripped from a Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter background texture (and don't even get me started on the impracticality of fitting human dentures over those abominations), and...retractable, projectile back hair? Oh, and the bait for that sequel that isn't going to happen? The Crites get his blood to "test his fitness for space travel," and make a clone army of dumb-looking CGI fat kids that we're supposed to be impressed by and/or terrified of, but just come off like the Ass-Blasters of the Critters Universe: over-goofy and underwhelming. At least the Queen in Critters Attack! struck a decent balance of unpredictability between "aww, ain't she cute?" and "oh, my God, fucking teeth and claws!"

Furthermore, the hybrid plot thread could have been made more interesting by getting Nadine van der Velde to reprise her role as April (Bradley Brown's sister from the first movie), and making her the hybrid's mother. It would have made retroactive sense of the Krites kidnapping her at the end of Critters, and perhaps established some depth to the mother's character via a history of Stockholm Syndrome trauma, rather than casting some nobody, barely-an-actress as a random slut who had blackout sex with a rust-gargling, Satanic Muppet baby from outer space during Y2K. The original films were far from deep (the biggest character arc involved the town drunk--and possibly a pedophile--finding his true calling and working up the courage to shoot his best friend in the face, just as an example), but the originals' strong performances made the few deep moments that were attempted feel natural, the comedy at least attempted to be its own thing, and the carnage was kept to some kind of minimum to make it feel special and let the campiness work its magic. A New Binge is all shallow, all comedy, all carnage, all the time, and it just doesn't work.

So, that was the last of the Critters material that has been put forth so far. As of this posting, there are no plans to make any further installments or reboots, a grace that I eagerly accept.

Since my review of the Tremors Anthology (plus Bloodlines), the Kevin Bacon SyFy series has been scrapped for various reasons, and two new films have joined the franchise, which I plan to review as a double-feature when time permits. For now, Stay Tuned and don't feed your Blu-Ray player shitty movies after midnight, or they will transform into Critters reboots and begin multiplying like a wet Mogwai on prom night.

Ticketmaster,

out!