With an obviously reduced budget, "Critters 3" goes farther downhill with every passing minute. It lacks charm, humor, continuity, and decent acting. Oh, and it stars a very young Leonardo DiCaprio. That makes five strikes.

A father of two makes a trip to drop his children off in Los Angeles with friends of the family. Unbeknownst to them, the Crites, space-born garbage disposals, have laid their eggs on the underside of his truck. Now stuck inside the building with no way to communicate with the outside world, they have no choice but to make it to the roof and call for help.

Let's start with all the lapses in logic. First, their communication and power is cut, but not by the Critters. No, the "evil" landlord does and it never really makes any sense why. Second, a fire is started after one of the monsters attempts to eat a flare. This happens around the half hour mark. By the time the building actually becomes dangerous, everyone is on the roof. The fire never spreads past the basement. Third, though the building is huge, only about eight people must live in it. That, or no one else seems to notice the rather large intergalactic rat problem.

Each character is so underdeveloped, I'm not sure I even know the name of the father, and he's a main character. The only two characters you'll really know are his daughter Annie (Aimee Brooks) and Josh (that Dicaprio fella). Only a single character returns and that's Charlie (Don Keith Opper), town drunk turned bounty hunter. He gets 15-minutes of screen time not including a 10-minute flashback sequence that plays out more like a trailer. It's never explained why the Crites are still around (they were supposedly destroyed in the first sequel) or why Charlie is no longer the sheriff of Grovers Bend, the town that hosted the first two invasions.

Adding to the trouble is an awful soundtrack, one that never sounds serious enough to actually cause tension. In fact, all it really does is make everything seem comical. That's fine if the jokes work, but they don't. Yes, the Crites do manage to get a few moments to shine, but decent puppeteers must have been at a premium. The fact that they are just hand puppets is more obvious here than it ever was before.