Undescribable Perfection

That was an excellent one.

Blistering performances.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It seems that there is an unwritten rule when it comes to horror franchises that are teetering dangerously on the edge of bargain-bin hell. When the basic premise has been stretched so far that it is well past the line of self-parody, just transport the action to space. The Hellraiser franchise did it, the Friday the 13th films came to an embarrassing end with Jason X (2001), and even the Leprechaun series tried it, all to no avail. With the charm of the crites, or 'critters', all but disappearing by the time Critters 2 (1988) came around, it was never going to be long until the red-eyed killer pillows found themselves drifting through the cosmos.We were given a brief glimpse at the next instalment at the end of Critters 3 (1991), which was shot back-to-back with number 4, as the recurring, hapless bounty hunter Charlie (Don Keith Opper) found himself face-to-face with the last remaining crite eggs but halted from exterminating them by his alien friend Ug (Terrence Mann). It is against intergalactic law to cause a species' extinction and so Charlie is ordered to place the eggs in a preservation capsule but manages to stumble into it himself, and they are blasted off into space where they float around for 50 years. Luckily, or unluckily, for Charlie, he is found by a junk ship who are ordered by the Intergalactic Council to take their prize load to a nearby station to await further instruction.It is here that the crew of archetypes spend the bulk of the film bickering amongst themselves, and the film takes its sweet time for douchebag captain Rick (Anders Hove) to finally lose the plot and open their cargo, unleashing the crites on the unsuspecting bunch. Wasting an impressive cast that includes Angela Bassett, Brad Dourif and Twin Peaks' Eric DaRe, Critters 4 is just plain boring for the most part. With the crites themselves barely registering until the climax, the film stumbles around looking for interesting sub-plots to distinguish its characters but ultimately, like most movies of its ilk, ends up just ripping-off Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). A whimpering end to the Critters franchise that arguably should have ended two movies ago, although I'm sure a Hollywood remake is inevitable.

I had to write a review after reading one made by another reviewer. N J Darrant i would really like to know if you were serious or were you being sarcastic. Great film? One of the worst i have ever seen in my life. A must see please, please, please, PLEASE tell me you are joking. One of the best films of the twentieth century, i don't think you should be reviewing any more movies. I know that review is fourteen years old, so i don't expect a reply or answer to the question, but i would really love to know if he was serious. There is NOTHING good about this film, it is actually worst than the third one. Critters on a spaceship, what a load of s@%*. my vote is one out of ten and if i could go lower i would.

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