Zach Galligan defends 'Gremlins 2' 30-plus years later: 'It's almost a satire of the first one'

If you’ve always considered 1990’s crazy-pants sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch to be severely underrated, you are not alone. Director Joe Dante and star Zach Galligan are right there with you.

Galligan, who famously played Mogwai whisperer Billy Peltzer in both the 1984 horror-comedy classic Gremlins and its far less celebrated sequel, revealed as much in a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment at San Diego Comic-Con (watch above).

At SDCC to promote his return to the franchise in next year’s animated prequel series The Secret of the Mogwai, Galligan was explaining how he’s never lost touch with Dante, who serves as a consultant on the show, when the conversation veered toward The New Batch.

“Joe and I probably email each other every couple months,” Galligan says. “He sends me hilarious articles sometimes. Like he sent me a New York Times rave review of Gremlins 2, which if you remember, did not really get well-received at the time. And he sent me a rave review with just three words: ‘Vindicated at last.’”

While Gremlins 2 was a box office disappointment, it wasn’t exactly eviscerated by critics. If you go by Rotten Tomatoes math, where it currently has a 71 percent approval rating, for every pan it received (“busy but boring,” said Chicago Tribune’s famed Gene Siskel), it landed at least two nods (“better than the original,” said The Times’s David Robinson).

Galligan (and likely Dante) don’t believe the film earned appreciation for the big swings it took — like being a wackadoo parody of itself, in addition to lampooning Hollywood treasures like The Wizard of Oz, Rambo and Marathon Man. The plot, if you’ll recall, is essentially Gremlins in New York, complete with a bizarrely (brilliantly?) conceived new batch of adjunct creatures and a Frank Sinatra-inspired musical number. There are also Looney Tunes interludes, Christopher Lee’s mad scientist, a prescient character inspired by Donald Trump, and cameos from a fourth wall-breaking Hulk Hogan, Leonard Maltin, Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith. (In one of their most famous sketches, Key and Peele imagined what the brainstorm meeting must've looked like that resulted in the pure anarchy of Gremlins 2.)

“[It’s] subversive what Joe did, which was take a sequel and make it make fun of the first, it’s almost a satire of the first one,” Galligan says. “Most of the time when people go see a Blank 2, they want to see more of the same.

“I don’t think anyone’s done that since, before or after. And so I think the whole meta thing about it, or postmodern or however you want to describe it, threw a lot of people off. Because they were just expecting to see chunk two of Gremlins. And to be fair it threw me off, too, because a lot of it was very Mad Magazine-style humor going on. So it took a little bit of an adjustment to the new tone.”