Day 19: Gremlins (1984)

I watched this when I was a kid, and haven't seen it since. A while back I saw it at the movie store and picked it up with the intention of watching it again, which of course never happened, and it sat on my shelf with all the other DVDs. Last night, I return to Gizmo's world of Kingston Falls (for keen observers, the same lot used to film Back to the Future).

All I remembered from this film was the three rules - no bright lights (sunlight kills), no water, and no feeding after midnight. In fact, I was shocked when Gizmo was the only gremlin, and I couldn't figure out where the other ones were going to come from. So, I might as well have been watching the movie for the first time. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, and while it is obviously dated, it was a fun trip down nostalgic lane. Watching the film, though, brought up a large number of questions:

1) When can they be feed? Now, bear with me for a second here. The rule is that you can never feed them after midnight. Well, without a set time limit, it is always after midnight. Even 11:59 is after midnight, though granted closer to a different midnight. Is there an implied time that it ok to feed them? Is it at sunrise? Is it 8am? 7am? Or maybe it's ok to feed them after noon, since noon and midnight are the opposite of each other? I don't know the answer to this, but I know if I ever bought Gizmo I'd be sure to ask for clarification on this rule.
2) How is snow not water? Stripe escapes and runs across their snow covered lawn, and later the 1000s of gremlins run all over town and yet never undergo their water transformation.
3) What is with Kate? Seriously. Sure she provides a love interest for our generally incompetent protagonist Billy, but why give her such a messed up back story? For those of you who don't remember, she hates Christmas because when she was a kid her father dressed up as Santa and tried to climb down the chimney but got stuck and died. Not only does this have no relevance to the film, how is that even PG-13?
4) Where is everyone else in the town? Like really? Does no one else live there? There is a few scenes with other town folk being terrorized by the gremlins, but in the final scene in which Billy blows up the movie theater, no one is around! It's up to one boy to save the entire town?
5) The mom is kick-ass. She kills four of the original 5 gremlins by herself in her kitchen, and not just in some timid way. She knifes one, she pushes one into the food blender, and she microwaves another. She is the only person in the film who kills any Gremlins by hand. The rest are killed by sunlight or the explosion.
6) Who blows up a movie theatre? Like really? It was almost day, and they die in sunlight. They really just had to wait maybe 30 minutes and the issue would be all resolved, but no. Logically, let's blow up a building, and start a huge fire. Seeing as there is no one around for any of this, is the fire department around to put the fire out or is the whole town going to burn now? It's such a terrible solution to the problem.