Tremors (1990)

★★★½
Tremors is one of those amazing success stories in modern film. When it was released in 1990, it received good reviews, but it wasn't successful at the box office. That's where the beauty of home video comes in. Many times over the years, this format has elevated films from mediocre release to cult status. Friday and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery are two recent examples of movies that were wildly popular on video after unimpressive showings in theaters.

The unexpected success of Tremors was good enough to start a consistently solid series. Tremors 2: Aftershocks and Tremors 3: Back to Perfection are worthy follow-ups. What made the first film—and its sequels too—so good was its relentless sense of humor. Director Ron Underwood stages a lot of frightening situations, but he and screenwriters S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock weren’t afraid to package their movie as a comedy/horror story.

In the dusty town of Perfection, Nevada, life is uneventful for the most part. Perfection consists of a few scattered homes and a small grocery store. Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) are the local fix-it guys who spend much of their time bickering at one another. Early on, we know something is wrong in this town. Giant worms borrow underground to snatch their prey, as a few unlucky isolated residents discover. After a few more incidents, Valentine and Earl try to escape from town, but all the roads are blocked. They even try a getaway by horseback, but that proves ineffective as the worms are too fast.

Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter) is a geology student who has set up camp in the area to study seismic vibrations. After Valentine and Earl manage to kill one of the worms, she concludes that there are still three more left. The worms, termed graboids by store owner Mr. Chang (Victor Wong), move through the loose soil easily. They measure 20 feet long and have snake-like tentacles that emerge from their mouths. This feature allows the graboids to reach above ground to catch their next snack. The locals do have one advantage. Burt (Michael Gross) and Heather Gummer (Reba McEntire) have a stockpile of assault weapons at their disposal. They don't help much since the graboids are underground, but they do figure in a great scene in which Burt and Heather blast away one graboid that foolishly crashed into their basement.

Among the trapped residents are Melvin Plug (Robert Jacoby), Nancy Sterngood (Charlotte Stewart) and her daughter Mindy (pre-Jurassic Park Ariana Richards), among various others. As is normal for this kind of movie, many of the residents will fall prey to the graboids. The movie could have easily been a brainless monster movie, but Ron Underwood is too smart to let that happen. The script allows for plenty of ingenuity. As the characters learn how the graboids operate, they come up with some clever ideas for either staying alive or fooling them. The graboids, for all their nastiness, are smart creatures. As the humans improvise their situation, the graboids do the same, continuously upping the ante every step of the way.

In the midst of the chaos, there's plenty of room for humor. This is primarily a horror movie, but a tame one with lots of laughs thrown in. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward have amazing chemistry. They insult each other often enough but always in a friendly way. The movie's violence is surprisingly gooey but also cartoonish. When a graboid explodes, orange blood splatters on the characters. The movie's witty approach towards gore is enough to warrant a PG-13 rating instead of an R.

Tremors presents a scary situation for its characters and handles it with droll humor. That alone would be enough for a passable film, but the filmmakers realized that by coming up with clever sequences can the movie truly succeed. There's more here than action and scares; the characters use their brains to figure a way out of their predicament. For that reason, Tremors is much more than a disposable watch-it-one-time monster movie.

© 2004 Silver Screen Reviews