Ron Underwood’s affectionate tribute to 50s monster films spawned a series of mostly uninspiring sequels and a short lived small screen spin-off in 2003. Ignore them, and remind yourself just how much fun this knowingly daft but also very clever and frequently hilarious tribute to the desert-set throwback really is.
In the Nevada settlement of Perfection (it’s not much more than a scattered collection of caravans, tin shacks and wooden homes and shops but a sign amusingly bills it as the “city of Perfection”), handymen Valentine “Val” McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) dream of getting out of town and heading for the bright lights of the nearby town of Bixby. Their plans are scuppered when various residents of Perfection, passers-by and visiting road workers turn up dead in very mysterious circumstances. With the help of a graduate student, Rhonda LeBeck (Carter Finn), conducting seismology tests in the area, they realise that the culprits are a trio of huge, worm-like creatures, dubbed “graboids” by Perfection’s general store owner (Victor Wong) that soon have the residents cowering on their rooftops being picked off one-by-one.
The film’s not-so-secret weapon are Bacon and Ward and their likable and very believable on-screen relationship. Val and Earl are affable rogues, not terribly bright but smart enough to come up with various hare-brained ideas to tackle the graboid menace, bickering with each other, dreaming of a better life and proving to be unlikely leaders when their home comes under threat. Unusually, Tremors presents its diverse group of characters (which includes heavily armed survivalists Burt (Michael Gross) and Heather Gummer (country music star Reba McEntire), mother and daughter team Nancy (Charlotte Stewart) and Mindy Sterngood (future Jurassic Park (1993) co-star Ariana Richards), annoying teen Melvin (Bobby Jacoby) and general store regulars Edgar Deems (Sunshine Parker) and Nestor Cunningham (Richard Marcus)) band together to fight the menace rather than falling apart and turning on each other as the horror unfolds. Its their teamwork that gets the survivors out of Perfection and see off the last of the graboids.
Underwood, producer Gale Ann Hurd (of The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989) fame) and screenwriters Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson (who had scored a hit with the cute robot tale Short Circuit (1986), directed by John Badham) are canny enough to realise that having a cool monster is all well and good – and the graboids are very cool indeed – but also that a film of this sort stands or falls on how believable the human characters are. The good people of Perfection make mistakes, fall out and have one eye on the commercial possibilities of the horrors that have visited their town, but they’re good company and only when some of them don’t make it out alive do we realise that they’ve been built up as rather more than simply graboid fodder.
In truth, there’s little little that’s actually new or innovative in Tremors – in truth it’s really just Jaws (1975) with giant slugs (an early draft of the script was in fact titled Land Sharks) but it’s so much fun that it barely matters. The enjoyment comes from the details – Rhonda’s constant frustration at the locals constantly asking her what’s going on because she’s a “scientist” when she’s as clueless as the rest; Mindy’s obsessive pogo stick marathon attracting the blind, vibration seeking monsters; the locals speculating on not only what the creatures are and where they came from (“I vote for outer space. No way are these local boys”) but also what to call them, aware of the financial rewards that might come with having discovered them.
The key to Tremors‘ success is not just its believable cast of characters, and the top notch performances that bring them to life, or its monsters but its no nonsense, back to basics simplicity. It’s unashamedly old fashioned, the plot stripped back to the very basics, giving Maddock and Wilson the space to flesh out the characters and get the balance between the humour and the horror absolutely spot on. Underwood, making his feature debut, handles the final reel siege of the ramshackle town with considerable aplomb, making great use of Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr’s monsters, all created with physical models and props rather than CGI.
Tremors was only a moderate success at the box office (certainly not a flop, far from it, but not exactly a box office smash either) but became a huge hit when released to home video and led to a long-running franchise of direct-to-video sequels (Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001), Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004), Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015), Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018) and a planned but as yet untitled seventh film). A TV series, Tremors 2: Aftershocks – The Lost Monsters! was announced in 1996 but never went into production though a small screen incarnation was broadcast on Sci Fi in 2003 and a second television spin-off was being developed by the now renamed SyFy in 2018. But the bale channel passed on the the as yet unreleased pilot, directed by Vincenzo Natali.
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