 What do you picture when you hear gremlins? Cuddly animatronics? Slapstick monsters? The simple story of a young man learning to be a responsible pet owner. To celebrate this Christmas season, I rewatched Gremlins. Is it still the joyful children's movie I played on loop as a kid? A synopsis in case it's been a while since you watched the film. A middle-aged inventor named Randall Peltzer steals an adorable creature called a maguai from a Chinatown shop owner. The inventor gives this creature to his son Billy as a Christmas gift, and his son names it Gizmo. Randall explains that to raise a healthy Gizmo, Billy must obey these three rules. Number one, he hates bright lights, we know that. But you gotta keep him out of the sunlight. Sunlight will kill him. Number two, keep him away from water. Don't give him any water to drink. And whatever you do, don't give him a bath. And probably the most important thing, don't ever feed him after midnight. Billy disobeys the rules. Water forces Gizmo to birth many more maguai, and eating after midnight transforms said maguai into the titular Gremlins. Gremlins cause chaos throughout the small town until they're killed in a scene I can only assume inspired and glorious fact. The lead Gremlin, naturally, survives the explosion, but is killed in a fabulously graphic manner by Gizmo, and a extra helping of daylight. In the end, the Chinatown store owner returns for Gizmo, and the world just assumes riots caused all this damage, because in 1983, nobody had cameras or apparently memories. And now, the five parts of Gremlins I had forgotten entirely. Some are good, some are bad. All had been obliterated from my memory. Number one, Billy is the protagonist, but he's basically a spectator in his own movie. His dad brings Gizmo into the movie, Corey Feldman creates the first batch of maguai, his mom and Phoebe Cates do most of the ass-kicking, and Gizmo himself ultimately saves the day. You could remove Billy from the movie, and the movie would just be fine without him. Number two, Phoebe Cates. Phoebe Cates plays a two-dimensional love interest, until an out-of-left-field monologue about her father dressing up as Santa Claus and getting stuck in the chimney, only to be discovered dead days later. And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus. Number three, a school science teacher serves little purpose in the movie, except to die at the hands of the director's love for German expressionism. Look at those Dutch angles. Number four, Billy's mom. The movie flirts with excellence during a single scene right in the middle of the film. Billy's mother, Lynn, doesn't know gremlins are deadly yet, but she brutally murders a bushel of them without hesitation. A version of the film in which she goes full Ripley, killing every gremlin in town, is the gremlins remake we deserve. But all of this stuff, good and bad, takes a backseat to the real forgotten problem of the movie. It's super racist, like great grandpa talking about the war racist. In the first scene, the store owner is dressed as a crude Asian caricature, complete with glass eye, wispy beard, and opium pipe. We get lines like this. You got yourself a bad case of dragon breath. We get sound cues like this. And we see set decorations like this. In the very next scene, we meet our hero, Billy, but we also meet his do-good but casually racist neighbor, who believes that during World War II, Japan stuck little gremlins into all of our machinery, and they've been causing havoc ever since. The problem is this crackpot racist theory is, in the universe of the film, 100% correct. A handful of characters are killed in the film, the neighbor among them. And we're supposed to hate these characters because they're presented as racist in the movie. But how am I supposed to hate the racist dude when his racist rant correctly predicts a flood of mythical hell spawn? Here's the neighbor's own words. That's right. World War II. Good old WWII. You know, they're still shipping them over here. They put them in the cars, they put them in the T-shirts. They put them in the stereos, and on the radios, you stick in your ears. They put them in their watches. They got little teeny gremlins for them. Now, I thought perhaps the neighbor's rant was only partially correct. Sure, gremlins exist, but they aren't some menace sent from the quote-unquote East to Ford America. They're just monsters. But then, at the end of the film, we get this warning. Just remember, it could be the death creature sent over by Japan by way of a shop in Chinatown. I've been trying to understand how this got made, and all I can assume is Gremlin speaks to a broad anxiety in America in the 1980s about the rapid rise of Japanese technology. That the same fears that inspired parent groups to attack Pokemon made Gremlin's now obvious problem seem palatable. In my opinion, parents should not let their kids watch Pokemon, play Pokemon, buy Pokemon cards, have anything whatsoever to do with Pokemon, because the message is violence. Neither a cartoonish screwball comedy or a moralistic children's film, Gremlins is just a racist parable about a mythical species sent from unspecified Asian nations. No joke, that is the entire point of the movie. So yeah, my memory was kind of right. The animatronics are still cute, there's some slapstick humor, like this flash dance bit. But mostly my memory was wrong. As a movie, its protagonist is a dud, its characters' actions barely make sense, and its only moral is, they're all out to get us. Does it hold up? No. Not at all. I didn't watch Gremlins 2, but I can only assume it's much better. Right? Right? Right? Right?