There’s no character in Joe Dante’s Gremlins more beloved than Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton), a struggling inventor from small-town Kingston Falls who travels the country bearing a great sales pitch (“I make the illogical logical”) and a bunch of products that keep backfiring on him. His Bathroom Buddy, a combination shaving mirror/toothbrush/toothpick/nail file/dental mirror, could be a Swiss army knife for overnighters were it not for a misfiring toothpaste button. His coffee machine makes sludge. His peeler-juicer is a kitchen-wide pulp explosion. And his egg-cracker is much more successful at breaking eggs than it’s designed to be.
Yet when Randall comes home for Christmas, he’s greeted to a hero’s welcome from his son, Billy (Zach Galligan), and his wife, Lynn (Frances Lee McCain), who laments that her husband’s inventions only work well for a couple of weeks, but never seems disappointed by him. He brings a cheerful disorder into their world that a more conventional breadwinner would not, and they love him for it. This year, he’s come home with a one-of-a-kind gift from a tucked-away shop in Chinatown that ends up swallowing the entire town in chaos. Yet when this all-night orgy of mayhem finally stops, he suffers no damage to his reputation. He is, at worst, a lovable screw-up.
