If I Ran the Movies, Part I

Today, I’m going to talk about what I would do with the sequels to a couple of very different franchises: Final Destination and Gremlins. They go together because both of my suggestions deal with the set-ups of the movies, and both of them screw with audience expectations.

Final Destination 4
We all know the formula for a Final Destination movie by now, right? We’re introduced to a group of young people who are going to be our protagonists, and then we watch them all perish in some elaborate and deadly accident. Once the last of them dies, it is revealed that what we just watched was, in fact, a psychic vision of impending disaster, which is then prevented. The rest of the movie occupies itself with the abstract force of “death” picking off the kids one by one, etc.

My version differs from this framework only in one important way. For illustrating my example I’ll use a rollercoaster, since I was watching the third Final Destination movie when I came up with this idea. (I hear that in the actual fourth Final Destination they’re going to be at NASCAR.)

Anyway, in my version, we’re introduced to a group of young people, given just enough time to get to know each one a little bit, maybe a total of fifteen minutes or so for the entire introduction montage thing. Then we watch them all die horrible deaths. Here’s where the change comes, though. Rather than a fade out or jump cut that reveals that it was all just a premonition, the camera pans from the last death over to the other group of young people who are actually our protagonists and whose psychic vision already prompted them to get off the rollercoaster just before the spectacular crash that we just witnessed. From there, the movie spools out as usual.

Gremlins 3
This one came about after the advent of the recent Gremlins-themed TV commercial, when a friend and I were discussing how you could possibly make a third Gremlins movie.

The problem is that Gremlins 2 effectively destroyed the franchise. Not by being bad, but by being so ridiculously over the top that the top was no longer visible anymore. In modern Internet parlance, the movie would’ve probably been referred to as jumping the shark, only in this case it jumped so far that it actually wound up in another dimension. A more awesome dimension than the one it had just left.

So the trick with Gremlins 3 would be, how would you one-up that?

My version of Gremlins 3 would open with a small town, not unlike Kingston Falls. You would have your usual opening credits montage of the small town (possibly in autumn, when small towns are at their most picturesque), you’d meet a group of people who could very easily be the stars, music would play, and then somehow Gremlins would get involved. Maybe a kid brings home a bad mogwai and feeds it after midnight. Something like that. The specifics of the spark of the Gremlin infestation are moot. Anyway, in short order, the Gremlins are overrunning the town, people are dying, cars are on fire, that sort of thing. Nothing here that we didn’t get at the end of the first movie. The trick is, this is maybe the first twenty minutes.

Then, once the infestation is clearly established, a rainstorm comes up, and the Gremlins flood the streets and begin multiplying as they are wont to do. That’s when a government plane flies overhead and drops some sort of experimental sunlight-y bomb on the town, ostensibly wiping all the Gremlins out. The credits roll.

Here’s where the big trick comes in. When I say the credits roll, I mean all of them, clear up to the MPAA logo that’s at the end of every credit sequence. These literally are the movie’s closing credits, and they’re the only ones it’ll ever get.

Once the credits have rolled all the way through, cut to a shot of the rubble that’s left of the town. In a normal movie, this would be the after-credit Easter egg, a couple-minute shot setting up a potential sequel or a gag. In this case, it plays out just like one. The camera pans in on the rubble, and a Gremlin hand suddenly thrusts out of it!

The difference is, this Gremlin hand is enormous. It seems that some unknown quantity in the sunlight-y bomb made it not destroy the Gremlins, but fuse them all into one giant (and I’m talking kaiju-size here) Gremlin, who also happens to be immune to sunlight (hence why the bomb needs to be sunlight-y, to give a half-assed movie explanation for this plot device). The rest of the movie (which runs a full and normal length) deals with people fighting the giant Gremlin, who should also probably mutate (sprout lots of arms, maybe) or pop off smaller Gremlins to keep things interesting.