Extrañas criaturas 4

During my childhood time I have seen the first three "Critters" movies and enjoyed 'em.They were fun and entertaining horror comedies perfect for adventurous horror loving kids.I have never seen "Critters 4",so I finally decided to check it out.My verdict:forgettable and pretty bad flick with strikingly low body count.The script by Joseph Lyle and David J. Schow is both predictable & clichéd,the plot rips off "Alien" and "Star Wars" and the sets look bland and murky.The tone of the film appears to be deadly serious throughout making it slow and dull."Critters 4" was apparently so low budget that the filmmakers couldn't afford any optical effects;the ones taken from "Android" look seriously dated.4 out of 10.One to avoid.

This final Critters movie changes a lot of what has been the formula for the three first. Where 1, 2 and 3 relied on humour and gore with the occasional scare, this last movie instead goes for a dark and for the most part serious mood. It rips off the original Alien, which kind of works at times, but the silly presence of the crites ruins the otherwise gloomy feeling. The film had been better by sticking to one atmosphere, and not both.

Angela Bassett and Brad Dourif join Leo DiCaprio in the short list of Oscar-nominated actors to have played second fiddle to the Chiodo Brothers' crap Critter hand-puppets; in this fourth outing for the voracious extraterrestrial fur-balls, Bassett and Dourif play part of the crew of a deep space salvage craft who retrieve a cryogenic pod containing the last two surviving Krite eggs (and Charlie the bounty hunter, once again played by Don Opper). When the pod is opened, the eggs hatch and the aliens go on the rampage.

Krites causing chaos in outer space could have made for a lot of fun, but rather than continue with the camp, B-movie spirit established over the first three Critters films, this effort goes for a much more sober style—something akin to Ridley Scott's Alien (but on a much lower budget).

This approach results in countless scenes of characters wandering down dark corridors littered with ducts and vents from where the toothy creatures might launch an attack, but while this might work wonders when the monsters are truly the stuff of nightmares (like H.R. Giger's genuinely terrifying xenomorph from Alien), the effect isn't anywhere near as effective when the threat is from dumb looking hedgehogs with naff glowing eyes. In the end, Critters 4 is far from scary, never funny, and ultimately very tedious.

Critters 4 was a complete disaster. It takes place immediately after the third one and this time they invade space about 50 years in the future. A space ship unknowingly brings the critters on board not knowing the danger of the little monsters. I'm not really sure of the plot, or why the space ship is roaming around space. I;m not even sure if Earth exists in this fourth Critters. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention, but I don't think much of what is going on is ever explained in the film. About 50 minutes in, we see three critters. For a Critters movie, that is a major disappointment. The other three films were actually funny and had some good "scares" and special effects. The scares in the Critters movies were never bone chilling, but they were fun scares. This fourth one skips all that and is about 90 minutes of nothing.

There are no comical moments in this at all. The Critters' personalities from the first three are all but gone. And they kind of make Ug a bad guy. If you watched the first two, you would know he would never try to hurt Charlie. They completely ruined that character which is also disappointing. The whole movie just didn't feel like a Critters sequel. That's the problem when they take horror films and put them in space.

Putting a horror franchise in space to create a sci-fi vibe almost never works, especially for a comedy horror series. You have to spend so much unnecessary time explaining about how the ship works, what the mission is, all sorts of technical and downright boring information. It's Critters for Pete's sake! Have the fur balls roll around a hotel for all I care, just don't put them in space. Well they did, and the movie wasn't very good.

Disappointing last entry to a pretty good series overall. The appearances of the Critters were far and few between and the story of part 4 was a complete mess.

3/10

Those pesky critters are now in space to munch on some new victims. I've said it once and I'll say it again. Anytime a franchsie moves the playing field to outer space, you know it is heading for trouble. While this wasn't the one to kill the series, part three was, it isn't any better then the other Alien clones on the market. Angela Bassett adds some heightened presence to it and it's moderately entertaining for what it is.

Rated PG-13; Violence and Profanity.