Member-only story
Critters 2 is an Accidental Genderfluid Fable
I’m not sure anyone’s ever accused Critters 2 of being deep. The 1988 schlock-fest is a puppet-driven sequel to 1986’s Critters — a silly b-movie that managed to make a bit more than four times its budget and spawn several sequels. When your whole budget consists of puppets and enough explosives to thoroughly explode mockups of Midwestern towns, it’s hard to go wrong.
I flicked the movie on during a rough day. Somehow I woke up with an anxiety-depression-dysphoria cocktail, and I needed something — anything — to distract from the poisonous thoughts. I didn’t expect to find something special about gender and identity in the tale of intergalactic exterminators eliminating carnivorous porcupines.
If you never saw these movies looped during basic cable monster sludge blocks as a kid, I’ll get you up to speed on the important bits. Critters 2 catches up with a small team of bounty hunters who zip around making planetary house calls on aliens that other aliens want dead. In this case, one exterminator is a human from the previous movie, but the other two are of their own extraterrestrial species that can mimic their appearance at will.
The fact that the two are named Ug and Lee tell you all you need to know about the flick’s subtlety. For their part, Ug took the look of a super-hairsprayed rockstar wannabe seen in the first movie (and is why sometimes I shout “The power of the night!” apropos of nothing to make my girlfriend laugh), but Lee is unformed — they’ve got the same steampunk-leather-heavy metal vibes going on, but their face looks like an unformed lump of Nickelodeon GAK.
Why hasn’t that alien picked a face?, the human asks. Well, replies the cut-rate Bon Jovi, that the alien hasn’t found the right self. “Can’t live in the wrong self,” they say.
WHAT?
I leaned forward from my spot on the couch. That’s how I felt for most of my life. I was in the wrong self. I can look back at photos from my first 36 years and see so much pain, how beaten down I felt. When…
