Joe Dante’s sequel to his own original is a post-modern text par excellence, but there’s lots more than just playful rootlessness(something of a reduction of the post-modern project, it must be admitted!) going on;
The jokes tend not just to play & revel in the intertextual glut; rather, Gremlins 2 takes firm/specific satirical aim & expresses real affection for any number of real things—like Dick Miller for instance, who has become to Dante as Francis Ford to his brother John; very technological/effects-ridden, but exuberantly & even joyfully so, such that you might say this is Expressionism that is optimistic, & has a smiling human face;
Actually, that would make the film not expressionistic, wouldn’t it? Anyway, this gleeful naughty joke-stuffed concoction is really beguiling, really fun; it’s no wonder that Dante would go on to direct the under-seen/appreciated Loony Tunes: Back in Action: he’s already working in the spirit of the great WB animators/directors, & he goes to show that the great old things that we lose probably only & always come back to us in new & reconstituted forms, if we only know to look for & find them …
P.S./confession: you know how I like to rag on Chris Columbus? Very enjoyable! But fair is fair, & requires me to point out that he wrote the first Gremlins …