The Critters franchise, includes American science fiction comedy-horror installments consisting of five feature films, and one television series.

Although widely believed to have been made to cash in on the success of the similarly themed Gremlins,[1][2][3] director Stephen Herek had refuted this in interviews, pointing out that the first Critters script was written by Domonic Muir long before Gremlins went into production, and subsequently underwent rewrites to reduce the similarities between the two films.

The individual Krites resemble small animals that are furry and spiky with large mouths filled with rows of sharp teeth.

The storyline for the first two films involves alien bounty hunters who hunt the Krites in a small American town.

The Krites exist solely to eat and breed; the main human characters in the films endeavor to survive and defeat them.

The creature effects work was done by The Chiodo Brothers, who later went on to make Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

Terrence Mann appears in all four films as an interstellar bounty hunter named Ug, as does Don Keith Opper as Charlie, an alcoholic who rises to the occasion when called upon to defend humankind.

[6] Serving as a reboot, the series shows the creatures, pursued by intergalactic bounty hunters, returning to Earth on a secret mission.

[11] Krites have been described as porcupines, rats, badgers, opossums, hedgehogs, rabid cats, Tasmanian devils, and a slew of other similar creatures.

[18][21] The second film introduces the giant Critter ball—an enormous sphere of Krites all latched onto each other to move as one single unit.

[9] Not much is revealed about this mechanism, except that it enables the herd to survive a factory explosion and being rammed by a pickup truck,[9][22] but not the direct impact of a bounty hunter space ship.

[18] A variation is shown at the end of the film, when a Krite tucks itself into a ball and revvs up as a means of attack.

In the first film, the Krites escape from a seemingly highly advanced prison asteroid where they are to be executed by hijacking a spaceship.

[9] In the third film, the Krites formulate a successful plan to infiltrate a room where humans have locked themselves by moving through the ventilation system.

[10] Critters 4 shows the Krites being able to easily use a space station's core control computer and change the navigation course from an unknown planet to Earth.