Sorry for making a second topic when this probably could have been shoehorned into the Twilight Zone topic, but it's something I meant to talk about before, when. . .well, I'll get to that.
Joe Dante's career had a really promising start. Piranha is a now-little scene horro-comedy made in the late 70s, after Jaws inspired a bunch of, well, not comedy copycats. Piranha was a Roger Corman movie, but it's probably one of the better ones. This is one of those movies I haven't seen since probably like, when Gilbert Gottfried hosted USA Up All Night, so I may be overstating its quality a bit. I remember it as being fun. James Cameron directed its notoriously terrible, decidedly non-comedy sequel. I think it was his first movie. For Dante, the movie is a good harbringer of the "Style" he would be most famous for.
After that he did the first The Howling movie, which spawned a series notorious for being amongst the bottom of the barrel of the sequeltastic 80s horror flicks. That said, the first one is pretty good. Not a classic like Nightmare on Elm Street or anything, but it is its own movie; not particularly similar to the slasher flicks that ruled the day, and for that reason it is kind of unique. There were lots of horror flicks made in the early 80s, but aside from the sporadic haunted house craze, 90% of them were slasher flicks. Although it lacks most of the silliness found in his other movies (it's there in small bits), it has a pretty tight script for a tossed off horror flick. No idea if that was Dante's doing. Anyway, people know the name of this movie today, it's pretty good, it's decidedly very 80s. It's a good, different for its time movie. And frankly, there aren't many good werewolf movies. Werewolves are kinda gay.
Then there's the Twilight Zone segment. See the other thread. It's good! And very Dante.
And then Gremlins. We all know Gremlins. It, of course, looms over the entirety of Dante's career, but rest assured that across the board it is probably his best movie. So rare is it that the best and the most popular are the same.
There were some other movies after this. Innerspace which I haven't seen (I am allergic to Martin Short). Uh, the Burbs which is kinda bad but has a cult following. Gremlins 2 which people have crazily varied opinions about. After that, well, nothing of note.
What the heck happened? He still does work, but it's all either shit or stuff that nobody ever sees (probably because it is shit). What almost spawned this thread previously was his horrible Masters of Horror episode Homecoming (the one where dead soldiers come back from the dead to vote a warmongering president out of office. . .yes, it's as "subtle" as it sounds).
I find it disappointing that someone with such a promising start, someone that made movies so different than the mainstream of the day, fell off somewhere along the line.
