Most critics respond warmly to Gremlins, praising Joe Dante’s collision of small-town Christmas cheer with unruly black comedy. The praise centres on the creature effects, the jokes at the expense of familiar film conventions, and the willingness to disrupt a comforting picture of American life. For the more enthusiastic reviewers, the mixture of adorable creatures and spiteful humour is precisely what makes the film work, with its mischief giving the seasonal setting an unusual bite.
The reservations concern how reliably that mixture holds together: several reviews find the mayhem predictable, the humour uneven or the human characters underdeveloped. Others question the emotional impact and the aggression towards a young audience. The spread is wide, though none of the reviews is wholly negative: Digital Spy celebrates the sadistic comedy and consumer-culture satire, while Variety finds that the effects leave the humans with little to do.