A Very Gremlins Christmas

GREMLINS (1984 ) is a comedy-horror hit written by Home Alone director Chris Columbus and produced by Steven Spielberg. Doors 7:30, Contest and live performance begins 8pm. Featuring an ugly holiday sweater contest with prizes! Wear your best (worst?) Holiday sweater to win gift certificates to local businesses and other fun prizes! Yuletide Treats Provided! Plus a live performance by Synthesizer Santa, aka Syntha Claus, aka Jolly Olde Synth Nick!

This hilariously funny, wickedly scary film is about a lovable, furry little Christmas gift that multiplies into many little Christmas gifts, with savage consequences. An inventor brings his family something special stolen from a mysterious shop in Chinatown– a small, cuddly creature known as a mogwai. The cute little fella comes with three crucial instructions: Keep him out of the sunlight, never get him wet, and never, ever, ever feed him after midnight. If these rules are followed, mogwai are great pets. But, of course, as with any fable, all the rules are broken and all hell breaks loose. It’s up to the inventor's son Billy (Zach Galligan) and his girlfriend (Phoebe Cates) to stop the mischievous, murderous little monsters and save their sleepy little town. Part science-fiction, part dark comedy, part family drama, GREMLINS is a cinematic gift that just keeps on giving year after year.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM:

"Gremlin" is a confrontation between Norman Rockwell's vision of Christmas and Hollywood's vision of the blood-sucking monkeys of voodoo island. It's fun. On the one hand, you have an idyllic American small town, with Burger Kings and Sears stores clustered merrily around the village square, and on the other hand you have a plague of reprehensible little beasties who behave like a rodent road company of Marlon Brando's motorcycle gang in The Wild One. At the level of Serious Film Criticism, it's a meditation on the myths in our movies: Christmas, families, monsters, retail stores, movies, boogeymen. At the level of Pop Movie-going, it's a sophisticated, witty B movie, in which the monsters are devouring not only the defenseless town, but decades of defenseless clichés. But don't go if you still believe in Santa Claus." 

-Roger Ebert

Synthesizer Santa, aka Syntha Claus, aka Jolly Olde Synth Nick, got his start in the entertainment industry centuries ago. His career took a turn with the advent of the electronic music synthesizer in the 1960s, when he decided to revamp his act with the latest technology in sonic possibilities. He replaced outdated concepts like reindeer and jingle bells with mono- and polyphonic synthesizers, vocoders and electronic drum machines and sequencers. Christmas carols and holiday music have never sounded better!