Those extraterrestrial flesh-eating furballs return for this quickie sequel, filmed back-to-back in early 1991 with CRITTERS 4.
Following the lead of CRITTERS 2, this follow-up takes its little monsters to the big city. To get there, they hop a ride on the pickup truck of a motherless family vacationing in an area called Grover's Bend. While at a rest stop, teenaged daughter Annie (Annie Brooks), and her little brother
Johnny (Christian and Joseph Cousins) make friends with a boy named Josh (Leonardo DiCaprio) and run into Charlie (Don Opper), the town drunk turned critter hunter from the previous films, who warns the kids about the still-existing menace. Annie and Johnny don't know that his ravings are true,
and that a critter has stowed away on their truck; they're more concerned about their father, Clifford (John Calvin), who's still disconsolate about the recent death of his wife and in the depths of his sorrow has been neglecting his children.
In addition to inner turmoil, an outside threat hangs over the family, as their tenement building's nasty maintenance man, Frank (Geoffrey Blake), has been helping the owner run the tenants out so the property can be put to more profitable uses. Once the critters arrive, they make short work of
Frank in the basement, and then head upstairs, attacking the overweight Rosalie (Diana Bellamy), who is rescued by Annie. Along with Clifford, Johnny and the remaining tenants, they flee to the building's attic, where everyone manages to hold the creatures temporarily at bay.
While the toothy beasts make mischief in the rooms below, the building receives some visitors: Josh and his father, who in a great coincidence happens to be the unscrupulous owner. He too falls victim to the critters, and Josh soon joins the other survivors in their fight against the monsters.
The tide of battle turns with the arrival of Charlie, alerted to the trouble by a green crystal he had given Johnny. He helps the tenants rout the beasts, while Annie and Josh find a tentative romance and Clifford learns to love his children again.
The happily-ever-after resolution of CRITTERS 3 is followed by a postscript that sets up the imminent CRITTERS 4, further establishing this as less its own film than just another chapter in a series. Lacking the subversive wit of the original film or even the breadth of scope of the negligible
CRITTERS 2, this is an intermittently entertaining but thoroughly inconsequential movie.
Corman film graduate Kristine Peterson, who won some notice with her steamy thriller BODY CHEMISTRY, directs competently enough, but is hard pressed to do anything truly original or interesting with David J. Schow's screenplay. Schow, in fact, may have been the wrong writer for this project in
the first place; known for his uncompromising "splatterpunk" fiction, he seems ill-suited to a story in which it's clear from the outset that only the bad people will die and that all the characters' personal problems will be resolved by turning away the critter attack.
That's not to say that there isn't some good material in CRITTERS 3, though most of the better scenes are comic, not horrific. The critters have some fun moments thanks to their cheerfully vicious personalities, and there are some laughs to be had when Rosalie falls in love at first sight with
the atypical hero Charlie. There are also a couple of good jolts when the critters pop out of nowhere to chomp onto somebody, but the horrific content is negated by only having the unsympathetic characters fall victim. This is really just by-the-numbers moviemaking, the kind of project that would
have been made with more zip back in the Corman glory days--if, in that pre-sequel crazy climate, it would have been made at all. (Violence.) leave a comment