Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 6:2	Budget Medium

Critters lay eggs that big? Man, no wonder they're always pissed off!

We open to find the bounty hunters working their trade on a strange planet with lots of smoky caves. Apparently one of them is being used as bait as he is suddenly attacked by a monster. Fortunately, there are other hunters and the monster is summarily dispatched. Upon reporting their success, the team is dismayed to find out that not only are there still Crites on Earth but that they will not be paid until they are all exterminated. Charlie is a little concerned that they are heading back to Earth. Meanwhile back on the farm, Brad Brown returns home to find that he is still strongly associated with "that night" where people went missing, houses blew up and the town became a laughing stock when the sheriff insisted it was flying saucers and critters. Needless to say, shortly after his arrival bad things start happening. As the critters get closer and closer to killing Brad and his Nana, the bounty hunters land on Earth. Le has taken the form of a Playboy playmate. They arrive in time to save the day causing only light structural damage to Nana's house and then chase the Crites down to the Hungry Heifer where they kill off a few, but more sneak away. Another attempt is made to gather the varmints all in one place but the combine into a giant furball and head back towards the church where the townsfolk have gathered. Charlie crashes the spaceship into the ball and saves the day.

A quiet little downtown. Note that there are only two parked cars. And look, an Easter Egg Hunt!	A green bug, oh, I get it. The bounty hunters were just being attacked by giant bugs.	Despite the fact that there are only two parked cars in the entire town, our heroine squeezes her truck in between them and then squeezes out of the truck butt first. Works for me.
Eggs!?! What, wait! In the previous movie the Brown place was completely blown to bits and then reassembled by the hunters. Did the reassemble the eggs too?	Oh, yeah. It is just as awful as it looks. Cutesy brikabrak in all sorts of bright pastels abound.	Nana looks like she has stuff under control, but the minute her back is turned...

Critters was a moderately successful low budget film and so the producers opted for a sequel and then another and then one more. They all share the same formula, Charlie does something stupid, the Crites kill someone, Charlie does something else stupid, the Crites multiply, Charlie shows that he has a heart of gold, the team kills most of the Crites. There tends to be a little more than that, but really the key to the movies is the Crites are slightly scary and apparently fun to kill. They seem to be based on the Tawny Frogmouth which is this short, squat bird with gray feathers and the most enormous mouth. Seriously, when this thing leans its head back and opens wide, it is all mouth on top. No teeth, but the idea is the same. Anyway, the Crites get all the good lines because the Bounty Hunters don't seem to have much to say and what little they do say is in broken English like "Kill Crites" and "Kill more Crites" and "Charlie good man". Shooting a Crite while saying something as mundane as "Take that you little furball" is completely beyond their abilities so you can imagine how hard it would be for them to say something actually clever.

One of the best parts of the movie is that there is a lot going on. Brad has a little romance with Megan, the Crites attack Nana, Harv is a reluctant hero, we lose a bounty hunter, the newspaper has a conflict about whether or not to put Brad's return in the paper. Surprisingly little time is spent watching people drive about or trudge through the woods or engage in pointless dialog. In some B movies there is only one plot thread and we follow it painfully to its conclusion. Peripheral characters exit only to be killed off by whatever boogie man is chasing down our main character. Here we have several threads, none of them clever, but none of them done to death. The only unusual thread is Wesley (played by Tom Hodges) who does at least three things that will always get you killed in a horror movie. First he finds the eggs and brings them to the attention of a junk dealer. I suspect he may have been spared because he traded the eggs for beer and Playboy magazines which seems perfectly reasonable to me. Later he would ignore Megan's plea for help as he tried to drive out of town. But most importantly he not only hit on Megan but he shoved Brad. One of the many life lessons that I have learned from my years of watching B movies is that if your town is even remotely likely to be attacked by aliens, serial killers or mutants of any kind, do not make a play for final girl or slutty girl. Either action almost invariably leads to your demise. However, if you are going to ignore this warning, at least go with slutty girl so that you have sex one last time before you die gruesomely. But I digress. So Wesley has done things that mark him as cannon fodder and yet, he survives. In fact, he comes out of this looking pretty good. When the townsfolk decide on a risky plan to rid themselves of the Crites, Wesley volunteers. And gets a smile from Megan which in itself can be deadly but he survives that as well. The Sheriff who replaced Harv, however, is not as lucky.

So now that we are in sequelville, the rules change. In a really good, one-off horror film anybody can die at any time. A good director will even build up a little backstory and sympathy for some of the characters he is planning on killing off just to make their death more disturbing. Losing the character that we are sure was going to be the final girl (or guy) unsettles us. However, once you make a sequel then you automatically think series and that means continuing characters. Critters 2 brings back Ug, Le, Charlie, Harv, Sal and, of course, Brad (Scott Grimes who would go on to play Dr. Archie Morris on ER). Once you start making a franchise you want to have some continuity from movie to movie. This is frequently done with recurring characters ideally played by the same actor. Often the actor will either want too much money or not want to be locked into the role, so while the character continues, the actor changes. An obvious example of this is the Bond franchise. Critters 2 does not want to kill off any of the characters that might be willing to return for the next movie nor does it want to be a really frightening movie. As a result there are only two victims with speaking roles. The other four or five deaths are of nameless extras. The low key violence, the lack of sympathetic characters dying and the generally comedic tone of the movie are all geared towards a horror-lite franchise. It makes it much like watching a TV series every week where you know the characters and you know what they'll do.

About the cast, Barry Corbin plays Sheriff Harv. Despite playing numerous roles on TV, he never played on ER. Scott Grimes managed to not only score a recurring role on ER, he also voiced Steve on "American Dad". Angela Bassett would appear in Critters 4, I wonder if they talked about their shared background? Liane Alexandra played ER as well, but before Grimes came to the show. I don't think it is a record, but it should be noted that she has appeared in three movie sequels, this one, "Wild Orchids II" and the horrible "Rock and Roll High School Forever" (curse you Corey Feldmen). Eddie Deezen has a mercifully short cameo which would have been worthwhile if he had been eaten by the Crites, but no.

When Le is told to transform, he turns into Roxanne Kernohan because Charlie is holding up a copy of Playboy. As Le transforms, his outfit bulges and rips in interesting places and eventually falls off leaving Roxanne in a little G string and the staple. While I appreciate the humor (and the nudity), I do have to wonder about the choice of material for the bounty hunter's amour. Seriously, if growing a pair of breast is enough to shred your battle gear, it is time to have a long talk with your supplier. Were I going to try to capture some nasty BEM, I'd want something a little more resilient. By the way extensive research has shown that the Playboy issue shown is the March 1979 issue which featured Denise O'Connell in the centerfold. Roxanne would have been about 18 or 19 at the time. She did appear in one of Playboy's lingerie specials in 1989 the year after Critters II was released. It is odd that the producers used a real magazine but did not tie in with Playboy a little more and have a current playmate in the role. When George Clooney ends up with playmate Teri Weigel in "Return of the Killer Tomatoes" which was also released 1988, she mimics the pose on her 1985 cover.

All in all this is a predictably fun movie. A couple of running jokes, a lively pace, plenty of little laughs make it easy to just go along with the flow. Because of the way they are handled, most of the deaths are funny rather than scary. Though I may be damming it with faint praise, it is not a bad sequel.

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