Critters

• The Krite effects ate exactly $100,000 of the roughly $2 million budget. The Chiodo Brothers built 24 puppets in a ten-week crunch — about six a day — using thin latex skins over urethane-foam cores.
• The hero 13-inch puppets had radio-controlled eyes and blinking lids, cable-rigged faces and hands, and air bladders in the throat and chest to fake breathing. The reflective eyeshine came from clear plexiglass spheres backed with Scotchlite tape. The signature move — curling into a ball and rolling — was a Chiodo invention, not in the script.
• Domonic Muir's screenplay predates Gremlins. It was first set up with Roger Corman before Bob Shaye snatched it for New Line with a bigger offer; the project only got greenlit after Gremlins cleaned up at the box office, then got rewritten to play down the resemblance.
• Voice actor Corey Burton built the Krites' chittering language himself, blending elements of French and Japanese, and a chunk of their dialogue is subtitled on screen.
• It was Stephen Herek's directorial debut — he met co-writer Domonic Muir while they worked as assistant editors on City Limits. Billy Zane turns up as doomed boyfriend Steve, with Dee Wallace, a young Scott Grimes as Brad, M. Emmet Walsh, and Lin Shaye also in the cast.
• In this first film the Krites grow physically larger with every meal — an ability the sequels quietly dropped — and they can fuse into one giant rolling sphere that flattens whatever's in front of it.

The Krites are a working-class revenge fantasy aimed at the Reagan-era family farm. They land on a struggling Kansas homestead during the 1980s farm crisis and literally consume the livestock, the food, the household — the appetite-with-teeth that was swallowing real farms whole. Brad's slingshot-and-firecracker defense is the small landholder refusing to be eaten.

The bounty hunters are the scarier monsters. The Krites are honest about what they want — to eat. The hunters arbitrarily borrow a human face off a magazine, then casually demolish a church, a bowling alley, and most of the town hunting their prey. The film quietly sides with the family against both the predators and the 'authorities' sent to handle them, since the cleanup crew does more damage than the pests.

The whole thing runs on the 1950s creature-feature playbook the Chiodos grew up on, not on Gremlins. The crash-landing menace, the all-American small town, the kid who sees the threat before the adults — it's a deliberate throwback that uses cute-but-vicious puppetry to smuggle real B-movie dread back into a decade that wanted its monsters merchandisable.

A pod of furry, fanged alien convicts called Krites breaks out of a maximum-security asteroid and crash-lands in rural Kansas, where the Brown family farm becomes an all-night buffet. The little bastards roll into spiked wrecking balls, fire venomous quills, and swell up with every bite. Two shape-shifting intergalactic bounty hunters — one wearing the face of a hair-metal singer — touch down to clean up the mess, leveling half the county in the process. Young Brad Brown grabs a slingshot and firecrackers and decides to defend the homestead himself.