Trailer
Plot summary
Billy Peltzer has settled in Manhattan with his fiancée Kate Beringer, some years after the earlier gremlin incident. Both work in Clamp Center, the tower owned by Daniel Clamp, who befriends Billy over his concept designs, and Marla Bloodstone, Billy's superior, takes an interest in him as well. Gizmo, once Billy's pet, loses his owner Sam Wing, and the mogwai is taken to the genetics laboratory inside the building, run by Doctor Cushing Catheter. Billy and Kate get Gizmo away from the lab. A broken drinking fountain then drenches the mogwai in Billy's office, and four new mogwai are born. The four become gremlins, and the building fills with a new batch of them.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Warner Bros. asked Joe Dante to direct a Gremlins sequel right away, but he declined, so the studio approached other directors and writers with ideas such as sending the gremlins to Las Vegas or Mars. Dante finally agreed after being promised complete creative control and a budget triple the original's.
- In a scene where the gremlins seem to hijack a movie theater's projector, Hulk Hogan, in a cameo, intimidates them into running the rest of the film, a joke borrowed from William Castle's The Tingler. Warner Bros. feared audiences would leave thinking the film had broken, so Joe Dante tested it on a preview crowd, which enjoyed it and stayed.
- For the VHS and Japanese LaserDisc releases, the filmmakers replaced the theater gag with gremlins appearing to sabotage the viewer's own VCR, changing channels onto Chisum, where John Wayne forces them to continue the film. Because Wayne had died in 1979, Chad Everett did the voice, recommended by Wayne's son, Patrick Wayne.
- Hoyt Axton was set to return as Billy's father in Gremlins 2, appearing at the end having designed special clothing that would keep Gizmo away from water for good, but the filmmakers dropped the scene at the last moment to save time.
- Billy Idol denied the filmmakers the right to use "Dancing with Myself", so Fats Domino's "I'm Ready" took its place, chosen by Joe Dante because it fit the beat Gizmo dances to.
- The scene where Mohawk turns into a spider-like monster uses part of Slayer's "Angel of Death", and the Brain Gremlin leads hundreds of gremlins in "New York, New York", a number Dante called "a shameless steal" from the 1934 film Dames.
- Joe Dante turned to Oscar-winning effects man Rick Baker, who at first refused, seeing Gremlins 2 as too much work when he would be succeeding Chris Walas rather than creating the gremlins; he accepted once it was suggested he could make the creatures more diverse.
- Executive producer Steven Spielberg felt the film had too many gremlins, and several scenes were cut, among them one in which the gremlins Daffy, Lenny and George sneak into television host Grandpa Fred's studio and "help" him host, later included in the tie-in novel.
