It’s almost impossible to believe this, but Gremlins was kind of marketed as a kids’ movie on its release. If that doesn’t sound crazy to you, you haven’t seen Gremlins recently. Because Gremlins is a straight-up horror film. It’s also funny, full of solid gags and smart little pop-culture parody moments, and the gremlins themselves are moderately cute (especially in their pre-mutation Mogwai stage) but the movie itself is violent, terrifying and packed with jump scares. Gremlins is so messed up that the MPAA created the PG-13 rating for it. There’s a Cronenbergian body-horror element to Gremlins that recurred kind of a lot in film in the 1980s; maybe special effects had reached the point of making it possible, but everything is damp and slimy and putrid and … just gross. If you were to plot Home Alone and Aliens on opposite ends of a line, the exact middle point would be Gremlins. One of them dies in a blender, for heaven’s sake. And there’s the infamous microwave, launcher of a thousand urban legends. Why did our parents let us see this movie? Anyway, come revisit your childhood trauma with the rest of us. Thanks, REWIND!