'They bite! ' threatened the publicity for this horror-fantasy. More accurately, 'they' fire poison quills, have lots of teeth and, despite being only a foot tall, eat everything in sight. That includes people, an accidental part of the diet when the Krites (as they are known in outer space) escape from a prison asteroid, steal a spaceship and head for the nearest colonised planet - Earth. They roll along the ground like tumbleweeds and can leap at their adversaries several feet in the air. Their adventures make for a kind of Eighties' version of a low-budget sci-fi movie of the Fifties, with some distinctly tongue-in-cheek asides: you'll enjoy the aged lady organist who tells sheriff M Emmet Walsh that the alien bounty hunters tracking the Critters were 'wearing really funny clothes - like Los Angeles'. The fiendish furballs are, of course, no match for the Kansas family they besiege - hardly surprising as mother Dee Wallace Stone was used to such deadly encounters after her brushes with E. T. , Cujo and Werewolves in The Howling.

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