Critters: The Alien Fur-Balls That Outlasted Their Gremlins Comparisons

By Vicky FastForward | The Scream Queen of Style

The Critters franchise was born from the most transparently derivative origins in 1980s horror: New Line Cinema, having observed the enormous success of Gremlins in 1984, rapidly developed a rival project about small alien creatures causing havoc in a rural setting. What makes Critters remarkable is how thoroughly it escaped those origins. The 1986 film is genuinely inventive — its bounty hunter characters, its Kansas farming family, its Krites (the franchise's official name for the creatures) who form rolling balls of teeth and appetite, all combine into something with its own distinct identity. By the time the franchise reached its fourth entry, set on a space station orbiting Earth, the Gremlins comparison had become largely irrelevant.

The shapeshifting bounty hunters pursuing the Krites are one of the franchise's great underappreciated inventions. Two alien law enforcement officers who crash in a small Kansas town and immediately absorb identities from television and music videos — one becomes a rock star, one becomes a generic human — provide a wonderfully absurdist B-plot that the franchise keeps finding ways to exploit. Charlie McFadden, the local drunk turned monster hunter played by Don Opper, appears in all four original films and becomes one of genre cinema's most unlikely recurring protagonists: a figure who stumbles into heroism by accident and keeps stumbling back every time the Krites return.

Critters 4 (1992) sent the franchise into space — predating Leprechaun 4's similar journey by three years, establishing that any self-respecting B-movie franchise of the era eventually had to visit the cosmos. The space setting worked better than expected, partly because the bounty hunter characters actually make more sense in a science fiction environment, and partly because confined space station corridors are legitimately effective for creature feature suspense. The film also featured Brad Dourif in a supporting role, which automatically improves any production by a measurable degree.

The franchise's most surprising extension came in 2019 with Critters: A New Binge, a six-episode web series produced for Shudder. The series returned to the original's tone while updating its references and introduced a new teenage cast encountering the Krites for the first time. It received modestly positive reviews and demonstrated that the franchise's core concept — carnivorous alien hairballs with attitude problems descend on ordinary people who must improvise their survival — remains functional regardless of era. The Krites themselves have been updated slightly in appearance but retain the fundamental design: rolling ball of spines, multiple mouths, furious appetite.

Critters earned its independence from the Gremlins comparison not by being better — the original Gremlins film is a masterwork in ways that Critters cannot match — but by committing to a different identity with genuine enthusiasm. Its extraterrestrial mythology, its recurring characters, its willingness to take its own ridiculous concept seriously: these are the qualities that allowed a transparently derivative production to develop into a franchise with its own cult following. The Krites are not the most original monsters in science fiction horror, but they are persistently, cheerfully their own thing, and that counts for considerably more than it might seem.