Tremors Review

You may remember I already did a review for Tremors A Cold Day in Hell earlier on in the year but there's a distinct lack of the rest of the series, so lets look at the original Tremors and see why it spawned five more films.

The original Tremors was not what you call a cinematic success, in fact it bombed at the box office, but found a new life in the video rental market and it became a cult classic.

The formula that the sequels followed can be traced back here, a small desert town is attacked by underground monsters. I suppose you could call Tremors a spoof of classic monster movies but in my opinion its more of a homage as it never parodies these older films instead it emulates character archetypes and does a very good job of recreating the atmosphere of films like The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

So whats the story then, two local handymen, Val and Earl played by Kevin Bacon and Fred Basset respectively, are barely making a living in the small desert town of Perfection, Nevada, the town is mainly populated by eccentric people like Burt Gummer, played by Micheal Gross, and his wife Heather, played by country western start Reba McEntire, who spend their days preparing for World War 3, and the owner of the towns only shop Walter Chang, played by Victor Wong. Val and Earl are fixing Chang's plumbing when the pipe bursts and covers them in sewage. This is the last straw for the two men as they leave town and decide to head to the nearby town of Bixby. But on their way out of town they are stopped by Nancy Sterngood, played by Charlotte Stewart, who offers them lunch if they deliver her some firewood, but they tell her they've quit the handyman jobs and are leaving.

They get back on the road again when they notice that someone is sitting on top of an electrical tower, this person is revealed to be Edgar Deems and when Val climbs the tower he notices that he is still grasping onto the towers beams and that he is clutching onto his .30-30 Winchester rifle, when the towns doctor, Jim Wallace arrives, played by Conrad Bachmann, he determines that Edgar has died of dehydration, possibly because be was too scared to come down.

Later on an unknown force kills a local farmer known as Old Fred, Val and Earl discover his severed head half buried in the sand and become convinced that there is a killer on the loose and they start the journey back to town to warn the others. On their way back to town they encounter two road workers who they tell to flee as there is a killer on the loose. But the road workers ignore them and soon they are killed by a mysterious underground creature.

Val and Earl try to get help, but find the phone lines are dead, and the only road out of town is completely blocked by the rock slide. Out of sight, a snake-like creature wraps itself around their truck's rear axle; the creature is torn apart when Val stomps on the accelerator and drives away, and they find it when they return to town.

Val and Earl borrow some horses in order to ride to Bixby to get help, when they come across the doctors car buried in the sand, the couple are no where to be found. The audience know that they were killed by the monsters the night before. As they press on to Bixby the horses are attacked, it a snake like creature emerges from the ground revealing the creature that was attached to the truck was one of just three tongues attached to a worm like creature, thrown from their horses, Val and Earl run for their lives, the chase ends when the eyeless monster burrows into the wall of a concrete aqueduct and dies on impact.

They manage to get back to perfection but not before its revealed that there are even more of the monsters, once back in town, Walter and Melvin decide that naming the creatures might bring more business to the town, this is soon disrupted when one of the monsters comes through the floor of the shop and eats Walter, most of our group manage to get to the roof just as a Burt and Heather return from a scouting mission. They try telling Burt over radio that the monsters are attracted to vibrations but Burt doesn't hear and starts up his brass cleaner producing the loudest dinner bell these monsters have heard. One of them crashes through the wall of his underground bunker, but thanks to his ingenuity and the huge wall of guns behind him he manages to kill one of the worms. Burt and Heather retreat to the roof while Val and Earl hatch a plan, they plan to use the towns old bulldozer to escape into the mountains, Val makes a dash for the dozer and starts it up, they stop to pick up Burt and Heather who as usual are packing way to much ammo before heading to the mountains.

But they are ambushed by the worms and are left stranded on a boulder. But by using some of Burt's gunpowder and wick they knock up some makeshift dynamite and blow up one of the worms, but the final one has learnt not to take the bait, and so Val lures it towards the cliff and it burrows straight though falling to its death.

And that was Tremors, and its pretty good. Sure it relies way to much on tropes and coincidence but at the end of the day its a classic shlocky monster movie that's just good fun.