GRIMLINS PTU! THE NEW BOTCH

GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (1990)
dir: Joe Dante

MAD #298, October 1990
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker

Real-estate developer Daniel Clamp (John Glover), who you'll never guess is a stand-in for, wants to guild a skyscraper on the site of shop owner Mr. Wing (Keye Luke) from the previous film. He sends some of his people to the store to try and convince Mr. Wing to sell, but he won't give in.

Mr. Wing dies a few weeks later and Mr. Clamp has nowbuilt his building, where Billy Seltzer (Zach Gilligan) and Kate (Phoebe Cates), now his fiancee, work. Clamp Enterprises also has a TV network which has a horror show whose host Fred (Robert Prosky) is friends with Billy.

There's a laboratory in the building as well. Often when the actor isn't that well known, Drucker doesn't even try to make a likeness of the actor, but surprisingly the lab doctor is generic here even though he's played by Christopher Lee, the most famous actor in the movie. Billy discovers that Gizmo the mogwai is in the lab, since he was on the property the Clamp Center was built over, and hides him in his office. Gizmo roams around the office after hours and a janitor (Jon Astin, the second most famous actor in the movie) gets him wet from a broken drinking fountain, and one of the rules from the first movie is not to get them wet because it will spawn new ones. Billy's boss Marla (Haviland Morris) is trying to promote him and come on to him at the food court below.

The other mogwai detain Gizmo as they run rampant throughout the building, and their eating from the food court after midnight makes them Gremlins. They set off the sprinkler system in the building to make the Gremlins multiply. Only Billy knows how to control them and bring the people in the building and Daniel Clamp to safety.

The other hero is Bruce Willis, who was having success with his own Die Hard franchise.

One of the shows on Clamp's network is a movie review show hosted by Leonard Maltin. The Gremlins have taken serums from the lab which have enabled them to combine with other species (there's a talking one voiced by Tony Randall). A Gremlin has spun a web and captured Marla, who Kate decides to save even though they are rivals. After several attempts to kill them, the Gremlins are finally all electrocuted.

The German edition of MAD had its own cover.

No use of Dick Miller is this parody or the parody of the previous film. He had a significant part in both movies and was in every Joe Dante movie as well as almost all New World pictures, where Dante got his start.