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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Thursday, April 2, 2020

"Tremors" turns 30, the most perfect B movie creature feature ever made



"We decided to leave town just one damn day too late!"
Valentine

  • I was there in the front rows on opening day, in a nearly empty theater, but I fell in love at once. The blend of humor and horror was fantastic. 
  • Well the horror no longer makes me jump, but I can never get enough of Val and Earl.


(Arstechnica)  -  It has been 30 years since the release of Tremors, an unabashed love letter to the B-movie creature features of the 1950s that remains as fresh today as it was three decades ago. The film is sheer perfection and ranks among my personal favorite films of all time. As Ars' own Nathan Mattise wrote last year, "If B-movie horror with flashes of comedic brilliance and a few edge-of-your-seat scares interests you, viewers likely can't do much better than Tremors."

Writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock came up with the initial idea for Tremors in the early 1980s while making educational safety videos for the US Navy. They climbed a desert boulder for a shot and pondered what they would do if, for some reason, they were stuck there due to some outside force they eventually dubbed "Land Sharks." A friend of theirs, Ron Underwood, was a documentary director for National Geographic and helped them develop a believable creature for what would become the script for Tremors. Wilson and Maddock hit the big time with their 1986 film Short Circuit (directed by John Badham), which enabled them to finally bring Tremors to the silver screen.

The story takes place in the tiny fictional desert town of Perfection, Nevada—population 15, at least at the start of the film. Local handymen/BFFs Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) are eking out an existence doing odd jobs for the residents in exchange for all that personal freedom. Said residents include Walter (Victor Chong) who runs the local market; teenaged horror Melvin (Bobby Jacoby); single mom Nancy (Charlotte Stewart), who sells pottery and has a daughter, Mindy (Ariana Richards); a doctor, Jim (Conrad Bachmann), and his wife, Megan (Bibi Besch); rancher Miguel (Tony Genaro); a survivalist couple, Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire); Nestor (Richard Marcus); and two elderly residents: Edgar Deems (Sunshine Parker) and "Old Fred" (Michael Dan Wagner), a farmer.

There's also a grad student, Rhonda (Finn Carter), who is spending the summer monitoring her university's seismology equipment. She soon picks up on some very strange readings, right about the time Perfection's residents start dying under mysterious circumstances. Eventually, everyone discovers the culprits: four giant subterranean creatures that Walter dubs "graboids," since they "hunt" by sensing vibrations and shooting snake-like protrusions out of their mouths to grab their prey. From then on, it's humans vs. graboids in a battle of wits to determine the survival of the fittest.

"Broke into the wrong goddam rec room didn't you, you bastards?!"
Burt Gummer

Tremors debuted in theaters on January 19, 1990 and grossed a mere $3.7 million opening weekend, eventually eking out $16.6 million domestically against its modest $11 million budget. Both Maddock and Wilson criticized the marketing of the film, with Maddock calling the theatrical trailer "cringeworthy." (It actually is pretty bad.) Critics generally liked the film, praising the performances and how well the film walked the tonal tightrope between horror and humor.

Tremors really took off with its release on home video (and, subsequently, DVD and streaming), gaining a substantial cult following. Numerous bad sequels followed, all straight-to-video/DVD. In style and tone, they had more in common with the Sharknado franchise than the original film. There was Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001), Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004), Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015), and Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018). 

A seventh installment, Tremors: Island Fury, is rumored to be in development. There was even a short-lived SyFy TV series in 2003, set just after the events of Tremors 3, that was abruptly cancelled after just 13 episodes.

I enjoy a cheesy SyFy flick as much as anyone, but none of the sequels even comes close to capturing the magic of the original Tremors. It's got a terrific cast of characters, for starters, all types one would expect to find in a town like Perfection. Burt's "UZI 4U" license plate and impassioned rants about eminent domain are just one example of many delightful details. 

The actors all nail their portrayals. (Special shoutout to Finn Carter's Rhonda, who is that rare gem in film: a believable working scientist.) It has an equally terrific script, with on-point dialogue that illuminates the intricate relationships among the residents, especially the inevitable tensions and arguments. ("I know, I know, he thinks he knows everything," Heather says soothingly to a disgruntled Burt after a face-off with Earl.)

Director Ron Underwood (who went on to make City Slickers and Mighty Joe Young) set the narrative up like a mystery, introducing us to the main characters and setting as they realize the threat that is coming for them. We don't see the graboids at all at first, just their victims. Val and Earl find Edgar Deems perched on an electrical tower, dead of dehydration. Something terrified him so much, despite his trusty Winchester rifle, that he chose to die slowly over days rather than come down.

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"Well, there sure as hell ain't nothing to stop us now... everybody we know between here and Bixby's already dead."
Earl



2 comments:

taminator013 said...

I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment of this movie. Perfection! Another that I really love is "Killer Klowns From Outer Space". Much sillier than "Tremors", but still great........

Gary said...

Killer Klowns - not my cup of tea, but my friends like it. Creature favorites of my: The Crawling Eye, Them, Anaconda, Snakes on a Plane, The Blob.