For my birthday I received the Tremors
box set, something that only
recently appeared on my radar when I read that a sixth film in the
series is due for release this year. I hadn't even realised that
there was a fifth one, although having seen the first, second and
fourth, I had deduced that there was likely a third. There was also a
short-lived TV series, which follows on directly from the third
movie, which I shall now have to add to my watchlist.
The
original Tremors (1990),
is a classic monster movie with a brilliant central concept. The
sandworm class of monster isn't wholly original to Tremors
– Beetlejuice had sandworms on
Saturn in 1988, and legends of the Mongolian deathworm date back to
at least the 1920s. Tremors,
though, is the first film I'm aware of to use the idea of an
underground worm as the central monster. Brent Maddock and S.S.
Wilson, the writers of the franchise, really thought about how the
creatures could make sense. The Graboids, with their wonderfully
ludicrous name, are brilliantly realised with physical props and
animatronics – state of the art techniques in 1990, and they look
so much more real than even the best CGI work. Cleverly, the Graboids
aren't revealed in full until a fair way into the film. To begin
with, we see the results of their attacks, followed by the attacks
themselves. Then we get a glimpse of a snake-like creature that is
killed trying to drag off the heroes' truck. Only later is it
revealed that this is just one tongue/tentacle of a much bigger
monster, a thirty-foot beaked worm that emerges from beneath the
ground, hunting its prey by listening to the vibrations made by
movement on the surface. The final revelation is that there are three
more of the creatures, weaving their way under the ground of the
valley in which the town of Perfection is situated. It still bothers
me that the monster on the poster barely resembles the creature in
the actual film, instead being a modified and hugely inflated version
of one of the tentacles.
Aside
from the brilliant monster, it's the characters that make Tremors
work so well. There's one thing
the original has that all the sequels lack: Kevin Bacon. Some of the
dialogue in Tremors is
risible, but when you have someone with Bacon's charisma delivering
it, it works. Bacon is one half of double act Val and Earl, along
with Fred Ward, a couple of odd job men who have a relationship of
mutual disrespect. There's a lovely father-son relationship between
them, with Earl as the elder straight man and Val as the cocky kid.
They're part of a community in the town of Perfection, mostly
lifelong locals but also Walter Chang (Victor Wong), the owner of the
only store in town and the man who names the Graboid, planning to use
it as a moneymaking attraction before he gets eaten, and the Gummers.
The Gummers are characters that, by right, I shouldn't be able to
stand; a pair of right-wing gun nuts who relocated to Perfection for
its complete geographic isolation and set up a self-sufficient bunker
in case of World War Three. Yet somehow they're the most likeable and
funny characters in the franchise, with Burt Gummer (Michael Gross)
becoming the single linking character throughout all the films and
the TV series, although his wife (Reba McEntire) doesn't return after
the first film.
The
final outsider is Rhonda LeBeck, played by Finn Carter. She's a
hugely likeable leading lady, and it's surprising that she didn't
appear in more films after this. A seismologist studying the strange
geological activity in the area, she becomes the catch-all scientist
for the film, a nice send-up of sci-fi monster movies where
scientists are treated as jack-of-all-trades all-rounders instead of
the specialists they usually are. There's another nice pop at the
conventions when Rhonda, Val and Earl take guesses at the origins of
the creatures, going for space aliens, genetically engineered
weapons, radioactive mutations and prehistoric monsters (the latter
turns out to be true in the next movie). Rhonda and Val have a
sweetly awkward romance, another character dynamic that makes the
film work so well. The relationships and humour, along with the
combination of a killer central monster and the nature of the setting
(both expansive and isolated), make Tremors work
so very well.
A
sequel was a pretty obvious, given the success of the original as a
popular and cult hit (even if Kevin Bacon initially hated it).
Nonetheless, it didn't arrive until six years later, and went
straight to video. Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996)
has a brilliant tagline: “The worms have turned.” Fred Ward
returns as Earl, hired to help capture or kill Graboids that have
overrun a plot in Mexico. He's joined by Grady Hoover (Christopher
Gartin) as his new young plucky sidekick, but fake Bacon is no
substitute for the real thing. There's also a new female scientist, a
geologist named Kate “White” Reilly (Helen Shaver), who provides
the scientific exposition (although she doesn't know what the word
“hermaphrodite” means). She's also the romantic interest for Earl,
and having an older woman to match the older hero is a nice touch.
Still, it's hard to escape the impression that these are weaker
stand-ins for the original team.
To
expand the idea enough to carry another film, the writers introduce a
new form for the creatures. After spending some time polishing off
Graboids, recruiting Burt Gummer to assist (literally bringing in the
big guns), there's a risk that the monsters are going to be reduced
as a threat (just like the Alien before them, or the Borg, or
Godzilla, or any one of a hundred recurring monsters). With this in
mind, having the Graboids transform, hatching into new creatures,
keeps things fresh. Still, the new life stage, the Shriekers, are
nowhere near as effective as the original Graboids. The influence of
Jurassic Park can be
felt here, and not only with the talk of a Graboid theme park; the
Shriekers look a lot like piggy Velociraptors.
Other than the beaked face, there's little to identify them as part
of the same species as the Graboids. They now run around above the
ground, and their most frightening feature, hunting people by the
tiniest sound they make, is removed. Instead, the creatures are deaf
and essentially blind, hunting by the infrared radiation produced by
body heat, much like a rattlesnake (or the Predator). They also have
a peculiar method of reproduction, hacking up a fully formed Shrieker
after they've eaten enough food. Aftershocks is
good fun, but it's a poor comparison with the original.
Tremors 3: Back to Perfection
(2001), as the title suggests,
goes back to the setting of the original, bringing back all the
surviving minor characters from that film: Ariana Richards as Mindy
(all growed up), Charlotte Stewart as her mum Nancy, Tony Genaro as
Miguel, even Robert Jayne as Melvin, no longer a teenager but still
an obnoxious creep. The writers have finally realised that Michael
Gross is the star of their franchise, and Burt Gummer has now been
promoted to lead hero, still living in Perfection and completely
equipped for a Graboid incursion, in spite of the creatures being
extinct in the area for the last eleven years. He's even got a new
house that is built into an impenetrable concrete shell. In some of
the best exposition I've ever heard, Burt lays out the life cycle of
the Graboid as known so far in the opening moments, happily covering
the developments of the second film. Back in Perfection, Chang's
niece Jodi (Susan Chuang) runs a rebuilt store in his honour, selling
Graboid merchandise alongside all the essentials (the comics look
pretty cool, even if they do consistently misspell Shrieker as
“Shreiker”). Meanwhile, up-and-comer Jack Sawyer (Shawn
Christian) is making money by conning stupid tourists into shelling
out for Graboid tours. Of course, hilarity ensues when the Graboids
turn out to be less-than-extinct in Perfection.
Technically
speaking, this is the weakest of the three films so far. By this
stage, CGI had gotten cheap enough to render the bulk of the effects.
This is the beginning of the era of low-budget CG monster movies, with
shonky CGI horrors en masse.
It's just not as effective as physical effects though, and while
there are some puppets used for human-Graboid interaction, the best
shots are reused footage from the first film (with a completely
different texture so that they stand out like a sore thumb). The
increasingly unlikely Graboid life cycle gets a third and final
stage, as the Shriekers turn out to be surprisingly short-lived,
sloughing off their skins to become Ass-Blasters. I'm not keen on the
Ass-Blasters, although I love the idea that they use internal
propellants to fart themselves into the sky. I guess it makes sense
that the creatures go from underground, to above ground, to the
skies, and they are revealed to lay eggs, which goes some way to
making the life cycle make sense. I'm just not a fan of the design
though. They're even more dinosaur-like than the Shriekers, and with
the safari park elements, there's a definite Jurassic Park
riff going on here. Even the
ending has the same predatorial twist. However, they don't quite go
as far as having Ariana Richards recreate her classic Velociraptor
scene in the kitchens.
Still,
this is fun and overall more enjoyable than Aftershocks,
and this comes down to the characters. They can't save the worst
parts of the dialogue and they recycle old jokes, but the interaction
of likeable characters, along with the sense of community from the
original, make this a pretty successful follow-up. Very, very silly,
but a lot of fun, and we get to see Gummer swallowed by a Graboid and
still come out fighting.
After
three films and a follow-up TV series, things were beginning to get
pretty stale in Perfection, so for the fourth film a new direction
was taken. Tremors 4: The Legend Begins
goes back a century to the old West, when Perfection was still the
poorly marketed town of Rejection. This provides a shot in the arm to
the franchise and results in the best of the spin-off films. In many
ways, The Legend Begins goes
back to basics, cutting out Shriekers and Ass-Blasters and bringing
the focus back to the Graboids themselves. A slight new twist on the
creatures is provided by giving us little Graboid hatchlings that
rocket through the soil and leap out at their prey. The larvae are
recognisably Graboids – or Dirt Dragons as they're dubbed here –
but they're a somewhat different threat, requiring sharp shooters
rather than heavy munitions. Good thing it's the sort of place a
sharp shooter can be called upon to rid the town of varmints. Of
course, the full grown Graboids aren't far behind. Much of the film
takes place in and around a silver mine, giving us the unsettling
prospect of Graboids attacking as easily from above as from below,
and without ever giving them jet-propelled anuses.
Michael Gross is
the star once again, but this time playing Hiram Gummer, Burt's
ancestor and the owner of the silver mine. In a very funny twist on
the character, Hiram is an avowed pacifist who has never used a
firearm. It's great fun seeing him gradually embrace the life of a
paranoid gun nut. Gross is just brilliant, making the most of the
chance to play an uptight new character who's still very recognisably
a Gummer. History is rewritten in this instalment, with not only Burt
but Chang's ancestor settled in pre-Perfection. Sara Botsford plays
the rather Heather-like hotellier Christine, while August Schelleberg
is Tecopa, a young Native American who becomes Hiram's default
sidekick. Billy Drago has a memorable turn as laconic gunslinger
Black Hand Kelly. There's a lot of fun to be had with this idea, and
The Legend Begins rattles along nicely to an inventive finish.
It was a whopping
eleven years before the fifth and to-date-latest movie was released.
Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015) follows on from the 2003 TV
series, which itself follows on from Back to Perfection. Burt
Gummer, now getting on a bit, is making a tenuous living in the
deserts around Perfection as a celebrity survivalist, filming himself
in the wild living off snakes, like a less annoying Bear Grylls. This
gives Gross plenty of chances to talk directly to the camera and
exposit for all he's worth, bringing up any new viewers (or anyone
who's come straight from the original) on the Graboid life cycle once
again. So far, not so different from Back to Perfection, until
two new characters arrive: Travis Welker, replacement cameraman
(Jamie Kennedy) and Erich van Wyk (Daniel Janks), a dodgy South
African who recruits the pair of them to come back to the RSA with
him to take care of their Ass-Blaster problem. Of course, as Gummer
says, “If you've got Ass-Blasters, you've got Graboids.”
The new setting
works really well, finally taking the franchise out of Perfection and
shaking up the threat a little with it. Setting it in a safari
reserve gives the opportunity for some beautiful landscapes and
wildlife shots (plenty of stock footage usage here), and there's a
different feel to the movie than the wall-to-wall Americana of the
previous films. Gummer once more finds himself without the required
need-to-know information when facing a new, African species of
Graboid. Introducing them via the Ass-Blasters first is a different
approach too, so we're kept waiting for the eventual Graboid reveal.
There's some interesting use of southern African folklore,with the
Ass-Blasters likened to the impundulu, the legendary vampiric
lightning bird. They also have sickle claws, proving, in a well-executed kitchen scene, that what Back to Perfection was missing was indeed a Velociraptor tribute scene. By this stage, CGI had advanced to the point where
the monsters look bloody good, and there's no longer that huge gulf
in quality between physical and visual effects. The redesigned
monsters look gnarlier and more vicious than ever – the
Ass-Blasters are much better than the BtP version – and
while the Queen Graboid isn't as reworked, it's significantly larger
and nastier, and to top it off, the tongue/tentacles can detach and
go hunting on their own. While nothing beats the original Graboid
design and concept, the African version is just different enough to
keep things interesting.
Gross is still the
star as Gummer, now completely embodying the role, while Jamie
Kennedy makes a good foil as the young and overly confident Travis.
Kennedy always skirts a line between likeable and annoying, and
that's no different here, but he manages to fall mostly on the right
side of that line. With a whole new cast of characters to introduce,
the writers take advantage of the uncertainty by bringing in
potentially significant figures and then killing them off, so no one
ever feels safe. Well, except for Travis's unrequited love interest
Nandi, played by the gorgeous Safrican actress Pearl Thusi. Brandon
Auret plays her on/off suitor Johan, who vies for the main action
role with Gummer.
Bloodlines was
a long-time coming, so it's not surprising I'd thought the franchise
dead. The original creative team had little to do with it, with W.
Truesmith and M.A. Deuce taking up writing duties, and a bit of new
blood does the franchise no harm. Early developments suggested an
Australian setting, but the decision to use South Africa works so
well that I'm pleased they changed their minds. Reportedly, Kevin
Bacon expressed interest in returning early on, taking time out from
his EE adverts, but this wasn't to be. In the event, we got a fifth
film that revives the franchise with some great humour and action.
I'm looking forward to the sixth film, the Arctic-set Tremors:
A Cold Day in Hell, which is due
in the coming months, and there are rumblings of a Bacon-filled
Netflix series. Still, Bloodlines ends
with Burt and Travis touring the world as monster hunters, and this
is a spin-off that surely we deserve to see.
