Critters Attack! (2019)

Movie Info

She’s kind of like the “Gizmo” of the Crites

Drea (Tashiana Washington) and her brother Phillip (Jaeden Noel) have lost their mother and are living with their uncle Lewis (Stephen Jennings).  As Drea dreams of getting into the local private college her mother attended, she takes a job as a babysitter for a high profile professor’s children Jake (Jack Fulton) and Trissy (Ava Preston) in the hopes she can use it as an entry point.  When Crites land near the campus, Drea and the others find themselves fighting for their lives in the isolated community.

Directed by Bobby Miller, Critters Attack! is a sci-fi horror comedy written by comic book writer Scott Lobdell.  Following Critters 4 from 1992, the movie premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in 2019 and was shortly released on DVD and streaming.  It was largely met by negative reviews.

Dee…maybe you should have just stayed a werewolf

Critters was a fun little franchise from the ’80s/’90s.  It was low-budget, goofy, and by no means high art.  The franchised died on straight-to-VHS releases, but 2019 showed a resurgence of Critters with Critters:  A New Binge on Shudder and Critters Attacks!…but the fun of the original movie is lost.

The movie sometimes has the right tone, but the pacing and script is awful.  There is no urgency and the comedy is more about how bad the story is delivered.  The logic of the movie doesn’t even seem right with this college town that apparently is so isolated that you need a satellite phone to reach civilization if something happens to regular phones and cell phones (plus, the size of the town with a gated college community seems questionable).

While you pretty much tune into Critters for the Critters and not the actors, the cast of this movie is exceedingly difficult to watch.  Dee Wallace (who appeared in the original film) brings the “fame” to the movie, but everyone stumbles through the picture like a bad Afternoon Special.  It is stock characters with stock acting.

I hope that is just an arm…

The visuals for the movie are on par with other Critters movies which is either a good or bad thing.  It is a good thing in that it matches up with the movies, but a bad thing in that Critters was made over thirty years before this movie and you could show them back-to-back.  I love the Critters, but there wasn’t enough “funny” Crite moments which made the older movies palpable.

Critters Attacks! is a bad movie.  If the movie was going to be R-Rated, I wish that it had gone all in on gore, language, and gratuity to become a reflexive film on the ’80s horror concept.  Instead, it feels like it was R-Rated just to potentially get more viewers who thought it would be gorier and more monstrous.  Critters are cheap films, and despite the poor quality of this film, I could see more being released.

Related Links:

Critters (1986)

Critters 2:  The Main Course (1988)

Critters 3 (1991)

Critters 4 (1992)