Exclusive sneak peek: Critters Attack! brings the furballs back in a deep-woods horror stakeout

Those little alien balls of terror aren’t finished with Earth quite yet. Critters Attack!, the fifth movie to crash-land the Critters franchise, is set to hit Blu-ray and digital this week, and SYFY WIRE is at ground zero with an all-new exclusive video preview.

Inspired by the original Critters films from the ’80s and ’90s, Critters Attack! follows 20-year-old Drea (Tashiana Washington), after she reluctantly takes on a babysitting job to get on the good side of a professor who teaches at a college she hopes to attend. That puts her — where else? — in a cabin in the woods, where things start going bump before she knows what she and her new charges are up against. 

In this exclusive clip, the mysterious Aunt Dee (original Critters star Dee Wallace, who played Helen Brown in the first film) stalks the woods to reunite with the alien Krites she encountered in another past — and it doesn’t take long before she makes her first up-close reacquaintance. 

The movie’s first trailer assured longtime fans that Critters Attack! isn’t sacrificing any of the fun, retro-horror vibe that’s given the franchise a special place in the hearts of ‘80s horror connoisseurs, and this new peek shows that the little fanged furballs may hold a place of prominence for Aunt Dee, too — but perhaps for all the wrong reasons.

Plot-wise, Drea has enough on her plate with the professor’s two kids Trissy (Ava Preston) and Jake (Jack Fulton), along with her own little brother Phillip (Jaeden Noel). While a fateful forest hike seems like the perfect way to entertain everyone at once, Drea is actually walking everyone straight into danger — unaware that the mysterious alien critters have crash-landed and started devouring every living thing they encounter.

Not helping matters is their disarming first critter encounter with Bianca, an exiled royal who’s attempting to flee the whole critters scene. With their guard down, the whole gang is being stalked — and when the critters converge on the college campus, Drea, the kids, and their new alien tagalong find themselves at the center of an epic us-versus-them battle, where Drea may have to reach down deep to discover her inner badass.

Written by Scott Lobdell (Happy Death Day) and directed by Bobby Miller (The Cleanse), Critters Attack! comes straight from original Critters franchise producers Rupert Harvey and Barry Opper, from Blue Ribbon Content in association with SYFY. The Krites arrive on digital platforms, as well as Blu-ray combo pack and DVD, starting July 23, before showing up on SYFY this October for the movie’s TV premiere.