Joe Dante

'Gremlins' (1984)

What It Said Then: Mixing the gee-whiz suburban fantasies of producer Steven Spielberg with the darker comedic vision, or director Joe Dante, "Gremlins" stood out as a big, bold, special effects-driven comedy with a mean streak -- and made us care about manic... more muppets gone mad.

What It Tells Us Now: Even with two decades' perspective, "Gremlins" (along with 1982's "The Thing") stands as one of the last and best films to rely on practical effects in the precomputer graphics era, in an era where puppets, push-rods and animatronics were still the state-of-the-art in making monsters come alive. To future audience, the gremlins of the film will look as charming -- and as quaint --as Ray Harryhausen's '50s stop-motions creations do to us.