Around Christmastime in 1989 there appeared a bus stop poster proclaiming the arrival of what looked like yet another tacky horror item — the artwork for Tremors featured an image of a huge creature reaching up at new victims, swiping the graphic motif from a certain Steven Spielberg hit. I remember a derisive comment on what looked like a rip-off — ‘somebody made a movie about the Land Shark from Saturday Night Live.’ The show was not a runaway success in theaters but cleaned up in home video, as soon as word got around.
Tremors looks awfully nice in this classy 4K presentation. Buyers be careful — the 4K and Blu-ray releases are separate. As with the earlier Arrow 4K of Flash Gordon, no standard 1080p Blu-ray feature is included in the 4K release.
Arrow Video’s impressive 4K disc is accompanied by a load of goodies that brings back the heyday of DVD — once upon a time, any kind of promotional item that would fit into a disc box was fair game. This one contains two posters, a set of mini-lobby cards and a ‘video rental’ coupon redeemable at Walter Chang’s desert market.
How does a monster movie distinguish itself? By breaking away from 35 years of dumbbell monster movie traditions. Teen audiences love outlandish & sneaky monsters whether they be werewolves, giant insects or things from outer space. But vintage monster epics almost always followed a generic pattern. Each tale begins from square one with strange phenomena and baffling killings that are ignored or written off to superstition. Then there’s the witnesses that nobody will believe. Not until Act 3 does the monster action really get in gear, and more often than not all the really exciting content (if any) occurs in the final reel. The rest is often humorless filler. By the late 1950s, one needed to be a real aficionado to stay involved in the subgenre. We all love Steve McQueen in The Blob, but for at least 95% of that picture, nothing happens.
The story concocted by S.S. Wilson, Brent Maddock and Ron Underwood skips Acts 1 and 2 and goes ‘right to the good stuff.’ Perfection, Nevada is under siege by giant worm monsters that can tunnel through the earth at an alarming speed. Handymen Valentine McKee and Earl Bassett (Kevin Bacon & Fred Ward) learn to escape the these ‘Graboids’ by seeking safety high above their reach, preferably on solid rock outcroppings. Being blind, the Graboids use sound vibrations to hunt their prey, forcing Val and Earl to concoct clever strategies to outwit them. Helping the boys are geologist Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), whose seismometers can track the Graboids. Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire) are survivalists with a basement of firepower capable of wiping out a small army.
The remote and insignificant Nevada town of Perfection is little more than a collection of shacks and trailers. It’s more humble than Universal’s Sand Rock, Arizona, where space aliens, a giant Tarantula! and crystal Monolith Monsters threatened helpless small-town folk. Perfection’s phones are out and the roads are blocked but the citizens aren’t standard victim types — the gun-obsessed Gummers all but welcome the opportunity to break open the ammo boxes. Tremors allows its characters to do intelligent battle with the beasts for at least sixty minutes of its 96- minute running time. There’s no padding with folk singing, square dancing or drag racing — it’s all about monster-fighting.
Is it fair to say that older movies of this kind were usually underfunded? Rushed productions can’t afford to have expensive actors standing around while effects men wrangle with unreliable rubber monsters, so it wasn’t unusual to have entire movies (Giant Gila Monster, anyone?) where people and monster almost never share the same shot. The monster scenes were often filmed last, after all the money had been spent — and when the actors saw the show, they were sometimes appalled to see themselves reacting in terror to threats more funny than scary.
Backed by Universal for something around a million dollars, Tremors sets out to win over the audience for Alien and Carpenter’s The Thing without short-changing the effects. The animatronic Graboids are big fleshy worms with snapping jaws; from their mouths slither tentacled tongues, each tipped with an eyeless, hydra- like ‘grabber’ head. When they burrow through the earth we immediately think of Carlo Rambaldi’s sandworms from David Lynch’s Dune. When a Graboid smashes upward through the Gummers’ basement ceiling, we’re reminded of the old UA picture The Monster that Challenged the World.
No effort was spared to bring the Graboids to life. Crews dug trenches out in the desert to hold underground rigs that make it look like giant gophers are burrowing underground. Tremors was partly filmed up in the Alabama Hills, a favorite location for vintage westerns; when we were kids we called the piles of rounded rock formations ‘potato rocks.’ The visuals suggest that the desert is like the ocean, and a Graboid digging through ordinary dirt might as well be a whale, or a shark. The only safety is to clamber atop something solid, like those potato rocks. Our desperate heroes hop between boulders to get back to their vehicles; whenever they run on ordinary ground, the Graboids are after them like a coyote on a Pekingese.
The show also earns major points for suspense detail: the sightless Graboids are attracted to any motion activity. Rhonda’s seismograph tells her that three individual Graboids are hunting for prey, using their internal vibe sensors. When a kid plays with a basketball, we know that the bouncing is likely to serve as a homing beacon. Most everything that happens is reasonably logical — pounding the ground is a good way to distract a Graboid away from somebody in danger. 2018’s A Quiet Place was about identical blind creatures that find their prey by sound. I found most of AQP to be laughably stupid, but I was in the minority on that one.
The clever effects for Tremors are almost all are practical illusions filmed without optical work. A number of spectacular scenes with the giant monsters are actually filmed on a smaller scale, in miniature sets. Miniature buildings and the Gummers’ basement are entirely convincing. The trick used to create a Graboid’s eye view as it tunnels is simple but brilliant. The direction springs dozens of tricky angles of fierce monster action — although the show isn’t exactly Great Cinema Art the shots flow with an unexpected ease and clarity. As a survival ordeal in the ‘here and now,’ it’s both involving and funny.
We really like the light-comedy acting team of Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, unhappy campers that never quite comprehend why they end up on the wrong end of every deal. Swearing seems appropriate when their cesspool-pumping equipment blows a hose right in their faces. The grossest visuals are the showers of greasy grimy Graboid guts that follow every successful worm detonation. The gun-crazy Burt and Heather Gummer stop being satirical targets when a Graboid invades their basement armory. We practical monster kids often asked why nobody simply shot James Arness’ The Thing from Another World with a bazooka. The joke here is in the Gummers’ obvious joy – they’ve invested a fortune in their survivalist arsenal and the Graboid invader gives them a chance to put their violent fantasies into action.
Tremors is a perfectly satisfactory monster thriller even if we’re not reaching to see if it won any Oscars. It launched a franchise that resulted in three more movies, so Universal must have thought somebody liked the concept. The creators worked on the sequels as well. Director Ron Underwood made several more films and became a busy TV director. Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson had credits on *batteries not included and the Short Circuit movies before Tremors and stayed with the franchise. Country singer Reba McEntire enjoyed a lively acting career including starring in her own TV sitcom.
A few years later, Wes Craven’s Scream series of slasher films introduced the reflexive idea that teenaged characters are fully aware of the movie-clichés they face. Tremors has a bit of that as well — the show seems to wink at us, acknowledging that ‘monster movie laws’ exist and having a fine time playing games with them.
