Awesome / Gremlins (1984)

• The film's Signature Scene, in which Billy's mom fights and kills three of five new Gremlins, using only whatever she has to hand in her kitchen. She gets the first one in a sneak attack by turning on the blender it's got its head in, then the second starts throwing plates at her. She picks up a TV tray as an improvised shield, closes with the monster, and stabs it to death with a kitchen knife. The third then throws a tray of cookies at her, and she blinds it with Flea and Tick killing spray, backing into the microwave before turning it on and exploding the Gremlin. (And then the microwave goes "ding!") She grabs two more kitchen knives to hunt down the remaining two, and while the fourth gets the drop on her and Billy beheads it, Lynn Peltzer made an amazing showing.
  "GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN!!"
  • Female action icons of The '80s: Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Lynn Peltzer.
• Billy brings Barney to the bank and ties his leash to under the counter. When Mrs. Deagle arrives to chew Billy out for damages done to her lawn display, she says she wants to take Barney to the kennel to have him put to sleep. When she goes on to say she would gladly ensure a far more inhumane death if given the chance, Barney unties his leash, leaps up on the counter and pounces the old bat (breaking what was left of her lawn display in the process). Good boy!
• Then later on, the Gremlins terrorize Deagle's house. Convinced the noise is just Christmas Carols, the old miser gets ready to shower them with a bucket of water, which of course, doesn't help things at all. Convinced the underworld has finally come to get her ("I'm not READY!!!") she panics and runs to her stair lift, which a gremlin has sabotaged, and is sent hurtling at rapid speed through a window on the top floor of her house.
• There's a Gremlin with a chainsaw. Gremlin. With. A. CHAINSAW!
  • Billy's whole duel with Stripe at the end of the movie. Stripe uses the clutter of the department store and his own intelligence to keep Billy off his game, almost toying with the poor man the whole way. A grown adult fighting a three foot Muppet could have looked ridiculous, but it's actually terrifying.
  • And amazingly, Billy's actor suggested the scene, simply because it would be awesome.
• Gizmo gets an epic moment himself when he uses a toy car to drive around the department store, followed by doing a Big Damn Heroes by opening the greenhouse blinds to expose Stripe to the morning sun, destroying him.
• For the filmmakers: filling a movie theater with Gremlins. Remember, this was before CGI, which would make this crowd shot extremely easy. For the wide shots, everyone on the production was operating a Gremlin, people from accounting were called in as emergency puppeteers. People with Gremlin hand puppets on each arm, busts of Gremlins nailed to boards and shaken by a crewmember, everything and anything they could think of to get as many Gremlins as possible on film, to show the true scope of the Gremlin horde.

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