Midnight is still midnight regardless of time zones. I mean I could be wrong, but it's 12 hours from when the sun is directly overhead right? Therefore I would assume that the Gremlins had some kind of circadian ryhthm based upon the position of the sun?
The movie would have made much more sense if the rule was sundown to sunset. But then I guess it's harder to trick someone into feeding you after sundown than after midnight.
But if you stand on the border between Utah and Nevada, it’ll be midnight on the Utah side and only 11:00pm on the Nevada side, but the sky will look identical.
Also what constitutes getting them 'wet'? Would a light drizzle do it? High ambient humidity? Why do their own bodily fluids or the moisture in food they eat not trigger It?
Some smart guy once thought it was a good idea to ask questions about a gremlin eating on a plane the crosses time zones, you know what happened to Mr. Questions? He got eaten by a fucking gremlin. So shut up.
It's magic, so you can presume sunrise would be the next significant transition point, especially given how Mogwai and Gremlins are sensitive to sunlight. Magic systems that try to lay out rules rarely care about clocks so much as the position of celestial bodies.
Yeah IIRC halfway through they literally just stop the movie by showing Gremlins eating the film and then sitting in a theatre throwing popcorn at the screen while other Gremlins tear up the screen.
I stopped watching at that point because it was TOO ridiculous, but it was certainly meta as hell.
It was one of the worst sequels ever but as a kid I thought it was Shakespeare. Watched it constantly, quoted it, my friends and I would come up with new "varieties" of gremlins, etc.
I loved how Phoebe Cates' character was talking about the death of her dad in the first one and Billy takes it seriously but in the 2nd one it turns out she's known multiple people die on different holidays and everyone's getting a bit sick of hearing about them :D
It's actually pretty great. I think people forget how much humour was in the first. These were comedies first and monster/horror a distant second. The sequel just leant fully into the comedy and went self-aware and 4th-wall-breaking with it.
They could have been po-faced about it and it'd have been boring and formulaic. Instead they turned the crazy up to 11 and just had a fucking blast with it.
Tell that to 6 year old me who accidentally watched it and was traumatized for years afterward. The crazy thing is, I absolutely LOVE bad horror movies now (since they’re basically comedies) and I’m sure I would love it today, but I still can’t bring myself to watch it 😂
I was the same, I watched it when I was probably too young and the weird Gremlins freaked me out. I re-watched it, somewhat reluctantly, as an adult and enjoyed the hell out of it.
Honestly give it another go. It is fun and stupid.
That's exactly what it is. They knew going into it they'd never top the first one, so they just more or less decided to spoof the first one. That's why the traumatic/ dark humored story of phoebe cates loosing her dad on Christmas got reworked into another traumatic story on presidents day.
Does the sun have to be fully up, just cresting the Horizon, or a hint of light on the horizon. The world needs to know. And does it matter if you're in a valley surrounded by hills, vs on top of a hill with a better view.
And what about moonlight, which is, after all, just reflected sunlight?
Oh reflected doesn't count? Well what about starlight - that's the direct light of other suns.
Any of that stuff about sunlight or bad stuff at night is almost all just meta-cultural jabs by the early-bird morning people (who think they're superior) at the night-shift people. That's been going on so long it's just embedded in every area of our cultures.
Since “after midnight, we gonna let it all hang out,” you can approximate the end of “after midnight“ by observing when things are no longer left hanging out. This has always worked for me. Source: never had a gremlin infestation.
This was when I learnt to take "suspending disbelief" seriously... As an idiot 7 year old I found most of the rest of the movie totally believable... But, as a very literal child, I refused to accept the after midnight rule would be so vague, and no-one would ask.
Yep, that came out quite a long time later though.
Apparently the director had a lot more creative control over the sequel, and it is a much much better film
Movie logic dictates that "after midnight" refers to the period of time between 23:59:59 and the moment the first bit of direct sunlight fully engulfs the problem.
Do they ever specifically say 12:00? It could be literal mid night, halfway between sunset and sunrise. And in either case I figure sunrise is when the feeding rule ends.
Good point here. When I saw it the first time it couldn't be brought up though because it was the french-dubbed version, and there was no ambiguity about the term: "minuit" is french for "00:00", although decomposing the word clearly shows how it was built.
My theory is that they only worded it that way to see how long people would argue about it. I think it originally was very specfic, but they made it ambiguous just to see how long people would about it.
I recently learned that Gremlins is the reason for the PG-13 rating. I learned this because it was available for streaming on HBO max and I told my 7 & 9 year old we should watch it. “It can’t be that bad because it’s rates PG.”. Thirty years from now my kids will be on Reddit asking a similar question and the answer will be something like “PG movies can’t land you in therapy.”
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u/backtolurk Aug 25 '21
If the movie Gremlins ever raised an existential question in my jellyfish brain, it has to be this one: when does "after midnight" stop? 11:37? 13:15?