An economically depressed town is visited by rampaging creatures in the 1984 Christmas classic they should have called It’s a Wonderful Lifeform.

All of Billy’s (Zach Galligan) Christmases come at once when his dad (Hoyt Axton) gives him a “mogwai” named Gizmo (Howie Mandel), a creature so cute it ought to be illegal (or at least regulated by pet ownership laws). But like all the best presents, it comes with a strict set of rules: don’t expose it to light, don’t get it wet, and don’t feed it after midnight. Before you can say “but it’s always after midnight”, the mogwai transforms from single tribble to multiple troglodyte.

For all its Christmas carnage, Gremlins works by establishing the town before unleashing its unholy night on the unsuspecting inhabitants. Billy looks too young to be working at a bank, but presumably needs the steady paycheck, given his father’s job as an inventor whose contraptions are constantly malfunctioning. And their neighbour (Dick Miller) is out of work, his incessant complaints about foreign machinery suggesting he was collateral in the collapse of American industry.

It all builds a backdrop of Dickensian seasonal cynicism; not the brink-of-bankruptcy melodrama from It’s a Wonderful Life but a general sense of malaise, the end of another sorry year looming with all the inevitability of a LadBaby Christmas number one. The gremlins exploit those cracks in the festive spirit, in the economy and machinery. They represent the two sides of humanity at Christmas: soft and fuzzy one moment, raging consumers the next. And it is only when Billy’s dad proposes mass marketing the mogwai as pets that they start to get nasty.

It is ironic then that Gremlins was so heavily merchandised, and inspired the nightmarish Furby craze of the late 1990s (Hasbro reportedly paid Warner Bros. a seven-figure settlement in 1998). But Joe Dante’s festive flick flies on its irreverence, the brilliantly animated monsters satirising the way humans behave in bars and cinemas. The ensuing anarchy is frenetic, frenzied and funny, packed with visual gags (the look on Billy and his mum’s face when forced to use his dad’s broken inventions is priceless) and likeable characters – be they human, canine or puppet.

Where its imitators awkwardly amp up the violence and mawkishness, Gremlins strikes the perfect balance between cynicism and warmth, creating the ultimate Christmas creature feature. Forget Frank Capra, this is truly wonderful.