After recently discovering that a seventh movie in the franchise had been released earlier this year (and whose DVD I duly purchased with great haste just a few days ago), I decided that it was high time to rewatch yet again my all-time favourite monster movie, so that's exactly what I did a couple of nights ago, and I enjoyed it every bit as much as I always do. The name of this movie? Tremors.
Directed by Ron Underwood and released in 1990, Tremors stars Kevin Bacon as Valentine ('Val') McKee and Fred Ward as Earl Bassett, a couple of buddies scratching out a living as odd-jobs men in a small isolated desert community in Nevada with what turns out to be the exceedingly ironic name of Perfection, bearing mind the wholesale devastation and terror that will soon take place there.
A greatly-deserved success at the box-office and (especially) in the home video/DVD market, as well as becoming a cult film, Tremors has also proven very popular among cryptozoological enthusiasts, and for good reason. Its story begins with several bizarre deaths in and around Perfection, leading our two heroes to speculate initially that a serial killer must be on the loose. However, with the assistance of student seismologist Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), whose field equipment is picking up some very sizeable but mystifying underground vibrations, they soon worm out the truth, literally – encountering an archaic, hitherto-undiscovered species of gargantuan subterranean worm with a taste for flesh...human flesh!
Extremely sensitive to groundborne vibrations, this extraordinary creature is equipped with a truly monstrous maw containing three very long, powerful, and highly-protrusible tongues or oral tentacles. These resemble thick muscular snakes and terminate in hideous mini-jaws of their own, which firmly grab hold of the worm's intended prey and haul it inside its jaws. Duly dubbed graboids by one of their hapless victims, three of these sand-dwelling vermiform horrors eventually isolate Perfection's last few survivors on the roofs of some buildings after they have destroyed everything else there in relentless pursuit of their would-be human prey, until two of them are finally annihilated.
Graboid #1 meets its doom by being shot with an elephant gun aimed directly inside its enormous jaws and throat by Perfection resident Burt Gummer (Michael Gross), who together with his wife Heather (C&W singing star Reba McEntire) owns an extremely impressive array of firearms and other weapons in their basement. The second graboid swallows one of the Gummers' bombs, hurled into its gaping maw by Earl, and duly explodes.
Graboid #3, however, is too cunning to swallow another hurled bomb, spitting it back out before it has time to explode inside its body. What to do now? Happily, Val has an idea. At great personal risk to his own survival, he uses himself as graboid bait, dramatically and very dangerously enticing this last marauding mega-worm to emerge out at speed through a high cliff face, so that it plummets to its much-welcomed death on the rocks hundreds of feet below.
Although there are some seriously scary, heart-stopping moments, and its special effects featuring the graboids are ultra-realistic, especially for the early 1990s, Tremors also succeeds in being wickedly tongue-in-cheek throughout, and does not take itself too seriously. On the contrary, what it does take is made abundantly clear right from the very beginning, via the film's opening shot –a rear view of Kevin Bacon's character Val standing at the edge of a cliff, urinating…
Like I said earlier, Tremors is my #1 favourite monster movie, an absolutely superb cryptozoology-themed creature feature. Consequently, I am extremely ashamed to say that although I have watched this film several times down through the years, I have yet to view any of its six direct-to-video/DVD sequels and prequel. Nor have I seen the associated 13-episode TV show from 2003, Tremors: The Series (speaking of which, a second TV series was mooted for 2018, in which Val, played once more by Kevin Bacon, returns, but it was cancelled before anything other than a publicity trailer, which can be viewed here, was made).
Not so long ago, however, I bought a DVD box-set containing the first four movies – Tremors (1990), Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), Tremors 3: Back To Perfection (2001), and the prequel Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004). More recently, I completed the set by purchasing the DVDs of Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015), Tremors: A Cold Day In Hell (2016), and, earlier this week, Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020). And today I finally purchased the last missing piece of the Tremors jigsaw - the TV series' complete DVD box-set.
Needless to say, therefore, a Tremors-themed binge watch is now imminent, and I am especially looking forward to seeing the three other equally rapacious morphological forms that occur in the graboid's life cycle. Namely, dirt dragons, shriekers, ass-blasters – oh my! None of these latter forms were seen or alluded to in the original movie (presumably because they hadn't been dreamed up at that stage by its creators, as no-one could be certain of how successful – or otherwise – this movie would be at the box office prior to its release). However, all of them will most definitely be revealed here when I review these films in due course. So watch this space!
Meanwhile, if you haven't seen Tremors – and I heartily recommend that you make up for lost time and do so at your earliest opportunity – here is a gripping trailer revealing just a little of what to expect from this monstrously entertaining movie!
Finally: A lot of people mistakenly believe or assume that the wholly fictitious graboid was directly inspired by a bona fide cryptozoological creature, the Mongolian death worm, but this is simply not true. At the time of the cinema release of Tremors, in 1990, the Mongolian death worm was virtually unknown and unreported outside its Asian desert homeland apart from a brief mention in a 1920s scientific paper. It wasn't until Czech explorer Ivan Mackerle started investigating and writing about it in the mid/late 1990s that western cryptozoology in turn began to learn about it. A more likely source of inspiration may have been the shai-hulud or giant sandworms in the series of Dune novels by Frank Herbert, the first one of which was originally published in 1965.
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I too like this movie. A good cast and as you say very tongue in cheek. The subsequent prequels and sequels are just OK.
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