Those toothy, rolling fuzzballs are back … and in space! Although they did the galaxy-quest thing well before Jason Voorhees, Pinhead or even the Leprechaun went into orbit, they certainly didn’t do it better.
Headed home from Saturn, members of a spaceship crew — played by Brad Dourif (Child’s Play), Eric DaRe (TV’s Twin Peaks) and a certainly now-ashamed Angela Bassett (Strange Days), among others — must fight for their lives when their craft becomes overrun by the exceedingly puppet-like varmints of the title. Said critters accidentally are freed from their eggs when a guy gets mad after Bassett punches him for walking in on her in the shower, so he shoots the eggs with an energy blast. It happens.
Directed by Rupert Harvey — who produced the 1986 original and 1991’s Critters 3, the inauspicious film debut of Leonardo DiCaprio — Critters 4 desperately would like to emulate Ridley Scott’s Alien. The problem with this goal is that Harvey’s monsters are silly, not scary, and yet Critters 4 isn’t spoofy.
But it is very cheap and very stupid, and at no time does anyone help Bassett get her groove back. The apex of humor comes at the end when the credits assure us that no critters were harmed in the making of the movie. Ooh, stop it! My sides are splittin’! —Rod Lott