Tom Mankiewicz wrote or co-wrote some of the most average James Bond films. That might seem like a perfectly good reason to politely ignore his passing, but it meant that his Bonds (Diamonds Are Forever, Live And Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me) reached massive - and massively varied - audiences, ensuring the survival of the brand for years to come. His place in the history of 007 should be neither underestimated nor overlooked.
Mankiewicz was also responsible for reshaping a humungous and flabby Superman script into two classic films, thereby creating the template for superhero movies that can be found at the core of every blockbuster with the suffix -Man since. Except maybe Rain Man.
Combine all that with uncredited work on Gremlins, The Goonies and Batman and it's easy to see how Tom Mankiewicz has almost certainly touched the lives of every single person reading this blog.
It was a toughie, it has to be said. Die Hard? Batman Returns? Jingle All The Way? In the end I plumped for Gremlins, perhaps because at its heart is a message with which I wholeheartedly agree: Don’t bother giving gifts at Christmas, they’ll only get lots of people killed and unleash havoc all across town.
I love Gremlins, despite its weak lead actors (did anybody grow up wanting to be Billy Peltzer?), because it’s as wicked and mischievous as its anti-muppet villains. It takes a cute little Midwestern town (which looks suspiciously like Back To The Future’s Hill Valley, probably because it is in fact the same set) where Phil Spector’s festive tunes are on a permanent loop, and rakes a vicious set of claws right across its face before sticking a hypodermic needle in its bum. And all this at Christmas - how dare they?
Well, because Christmas is a ridiculous, self-important time of the year and needs a good slap on the legs. It sits there at the end of December, waiting for us all to come to it, and demands we give it our full attention and spend obscene amounts of cash on it. It’s the spoilt child of the calendar year and that’s why I tend to ignore it and be somewhere it isn’t when it throws its annual tantrum.
But Gremlins does have important things to say: don’t give pets for Christmas without being prepared to look after them; don’t be a miserable old Scrooge like Mrs Deagle (who is satisfyingly ejected from a top-floor window to her doom rather than tediously learning the error of her ways), and don’t try and surprise your kids by dressing as Santa and climbing down the chimney like poor old Kate’s Dad. You’ll only slip, break your neck and be stuck there for days.
Besides all that, Gremlins contains some of the greatest puppet work ever, by Chris Walas, who also created the equally cute Brundlefly. Gizmo is the most expressive ball of fur with a hand up its bum in cinema history, and his ludicrously adorable squeaky voice only makes it even better. Although for all its genius animatronics, my favourite shot is the stop-motion reveal as hundreds of the vicious buggers emerge from the dark and head towards camera, bent on the destruction of Kingston Falls.
At the end Billy loses his Christmas present when the old man comes to take Gizmo away, and I was pleased to see he didn’t throw a strop, even though he was probably going to get a Bathroom Buddy off his idiot inventor Dad to replace it. Another valuable lesson, kids: be grateful for what you’ve got. And never let Corey Feldman into your bedroom.
