The first "Critters" movie was no classic, but it did manage to be an entertaining if disposable blend between a genuine horror film and a parody of "Gremlins." This sequel suffers from what inevitably happens when a film series feels compelled to up the ante: more explosions, more deaths, more slapstick, and, inexplicably, more sentiment, and it all adds up to less of everything.

The first movie ended as all 80s horror flicks do: a final shot that indicates that the horror is not over. A small number of critter eggs were left in the barn!

In the opening of this sequel, we learn that the family moved out of the farmhouse, and that's supposed to explain why the eggs were never found. Riiight. They packed up all their stuff but never glanced in the barn at what was lying there in plain sight.

Well, there are a WHOLE lot more eggs now than there were at the end of the first movie, but no matter. These two guys come by to loot the place, find the eggs, and figure they can sell them to an antique dealer (!?), and so they pack them up and truck them over to the house of one of the guys. He has a dog, but before the eggs even hatch, the dog mysteriously disappears. What made it disappear if the Critters hadn't hatched yet?

An old lady -- specifically the grandmother of Brad, the kid in the first movie, who has come back to town after a two year absence -- buys half the eggs from the guy to use at the church's Easter egg hunt. The other half get left by the furnace, providing the heat they need to hatch like an hour later.

The other half of the eggs get hatched when they are hidden for the Easter egg hunt, and the sun shines on them. And one more egg hatches when it is placed near the heating vent in the room of a little girl. Fascinating how spending two full midwest summers didn't provide enough heat to hatch them in the span of two years, but being by this girl's heating vent -- blasting hot air, apparently, in spite of the warm weather -- for ten minutes does the trick. The critter that hatches out of that particular egg, by the way, has probably the shortest life span of the bunch. The film's best intentionally funny scene involves a critter's eye view of what it's like to get stepped on by accident.

The original town sheriff got voted out of office two years ago and now lives in a trailer. The new sheriff was roped into dressing up as an Easter bunny. He has trouble with the fly on the costume, and he's still struggling with it as he walks over to the church. Something's not quite right, though. He's struggling to zip up his fly by groping around for the zipper with big Easter bunny costume hands, and, not only that, he's not even looking at what he's doing.

Naturally, critters suddenly leap into his fly and eat him.

We cut to the very bizarre alien bounty hunters, one of which has not yet taken on a human form. He sees a Playboy centerfold and turns into her. Naturally, she busts out of all those thick, rugged bounty hunter clothes.

Critters terrorize the town. There's a comical critter's eye view shot of one rolling around the streets. Another part of the town terrorization involves one guy who barricades a critter in his air ducts but, although he's a foot from the door, does not leave until three other people bust in on him.

Producer Robert Shaye gets in a plug for his other, better-known horror series when the bounty hunter playmate sees a life-sized cut-out of Freddie Kruger and starts to transform into him. Somebody else -- Charlie, the ex-drunk who now works with the alien bounty hunters -- throws the centerfold in front of the cut-out just in time, denying us what would have been an amusing cameo.

So there's this guy in a field, looking out into the night for critters, and he hollers back over his shoulder for this kid to get inside. Suddenly, something is RIGHT AT HIS FEET and eats him. Brad hears the scream, races over, stands in *exactly* the same spot, hollers over his shoulder at the kids to get inside, then turns back and continues peering out into the night. He steps forward and trips over the dead body RIGHT AT HIS FEET. Apparently that spot in the field is plagued by a mysterious Vortex of Blindness.

So critters are rolling around the field, eating up cows and stuff, and as the camera pans we realize that there are FAR more critters than there were eggs, and there is never any explanation about this.

Well, the townsfolk, barricaded up in the church, figure they can lure the critters to this food warehouse and blow them all up. So a team of people, which coincidentally consist of all the stars of the movie, sneaks out to the food warehouse and starts dumping the stores of food on the floor for bait. So they do. They unload all kinds of food on the floor, including french fries, condiments, and -- get this -- pre-assembled but uncooked cheeseburgers.

Somebody sets up a fan to blow the smell outside, and luckily the wind is right, so the smell wafts past the critters, and they start rolling toward the warehouse. Inexplicably, the townsfolk, instead of staying safe inside the church, FOLLOW THEM. Suddenly, the wind shifts, and the critters smell the townsfolk behind them, so they turn around and start rolling after the people. But then this really big critter stops and points out that cheeseburgers don't have bones, so the critters all start rolling back. They roll inside the warehouse and start gorging on food. All except for the big one.

Now that they're all inside, you'd think the team of stars would shut the door and blow it up, right? No, because they instinctively realize that they have to wait for a plot point to happen first. So they stare at the critters from outside until the big critter transforms back into one of the bounty hunters. Get it now? He disguised himself as a critter and lured them back into the warehouse! Ah, good, well, now that that plot point is taken care of, he can duck out of the warehouse -- pursued, of course -- and the warehouse may finally be closed and blown up.

Unfortunately, as is often the case in horror movies, explosions don't actually destroy anything if you don't happen to be watching at the time. The critters bust out in one big giant ball of critters that is so large that it must consist of THOUSANDS of critters. Far more, in any case, than went IN to the warehouse, and certainly far more than the few dozen that hatched from the eggs.

The big ball of critters rolls after the townspeople. It rolls over one guy, who is eaten into a skeleton as the ball tumbles over him, and makes for the church, where all the children are. The interesting thing about this critter ball is that you can only make out actual critters in the extreme close-ups. In the long shots, it's just a lumpy ball.

The team of stars pile into a truck and start ramming the critter ball, but that doesn't work. Oh, but wait! Charlie crashes a spaceship into the critter ball just in time! (Odd that he couldn't simply shoot it instead.)

Everybody gets so sad at Charlie's heroic death, that Ug, the bounty hunter, transforms into Charlie's image. But it's ok. Charlie shows up later, tangled up in parachute cords, and now we get to a scene that is so deliberate and purposeful yet meaningless that it's obvious it was thrown in as a neat special effect just because the filmmakers knew they could do it. The two Charlies face each other, and, five years before the movie "Dave" famously executed a similar effect flawlessly, one of the Charlies walks around the other. It's hilarious, because the two Charlies move so very slowly and deliberately, while everybody else stops to watch, and it looks as fake as badly done rear-projection. It was probably the best they could do at the time, so I don't fault the quality of the effect, but its random insertion into the movie is a riot.

The characters take forever to wind up their individual boring subplots. The male and female lead kiss simply because they are supposed to, and Charlie, whose subplot involved not feeling useful, is taken care of when the ex-sheriff tosses him his sheriff badge. (I guess they don't vote for town sheriffs anymore?) Speaking of the ex-sheriff, he delivers a rare quadruple-negative when he says to "not say nothin' about none of this to nobody."

Rating: 3.5 turkeys.