TREMORS II: AFTERSHOCKS
1996
Directed by S.S. Wilson
Written by Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson
You wouldn't know it to look at its sequel's release date, but Universal had duly recognized that even after it flopped in theaters in 1990, Tremors had hit after all on home video—popular, profitable, and potentially ready to be exploited to the hilt. And perhaps it would've been had all its principals been game. Tremors' screenwriters, S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, were raring to continue. Kevin Bacon, however, reportedly wasn't uninterested, but when he was asked to choose between a Tremors sequel and Apollo 13, he made the right choice for him. Reba McEntire likewise excused herself, owing to her musical commitments. Universal's tentative approval of a theatrical sequel was rapidly revoked, and the project, with an original budget of $17 million, was kicked down the corporate hierarchy, under the seemingly-sound logic that if your movie was only a hit on home video, then the proper place for its sequel would be home video, with none of the tedious, expensive theatrical distribution we give "real movies" gumming up the works. That budget was slashed to the bone, and the franchise might've been lost; if it hadn't happened already, it lost the attentions of its director and co-creator, Ron Underwood, because if he was ever up for directing it, he wouldn't have wanted to downshift his own seemingly-burgeoning career for it now (though considering that career, he might not have made the right choice for him).
Yet Wilson & Maddock rallied, and after deleting the big line items (notably, relocating the sequel's original narrative from Australia to "Mexico," as played by Los Angeles County), they even managed to convince their crew, especially their effects artists, to take paycuts, eventually getting that budget down to $4 million, with Wilson himself making the biggest sacrifice by directing for "free," which I will submit is somewhat theoretical given his stake in Stampede Entertainment, owners of Tremors, while it also gave him the opportunity to move up from directing second unit to the big seat. The screenplay credits are reversed this time: Maddock, then Wilson (though they're back to Wilson, then Maddock for Maddock's directorial debut on the second sequel, while Wilson remains top-billed for the third, which he directed); I present this without supposition, I just find it odd. Also not a matter for supposition: the sequel, Tremors II: Aftershocks (it's Tremors II onscreen, thus any reference to "Tremors 2" is simply wrong), was in the can by 1994, not a short time between films in a franchise already, but Universal, impressed by the effort, toyed for a year and a half with giving it a theatrical release after all. They didn't, and it came out—six years after Tremors—on VHS and Laserdisc in April 1996, and despite the delay, clearly it did well enough.
What I will make a matter of supposition is the claim sometimes repeated, resting on implications its creators have allowed to go unchecked, that the Tremors II that Wilson & Braddock made is more-or-less the same as the Tremors II they originally wrote. Maybe with the obvious exception: originally, Tremors II had Valentine McKee in it. But, hey, "Bacon said no, so we promoted Fred Ward to unambiguous lead and wrote an entirely new deuteragonistic dynamic around which the monster plot bent," could still fit into the same action-horror structure; so you could, without being unreasonable, stick to your whole "a video release shot for under 4 million dollars but it is really a 17 million dollar production at heart" P.R. line. (And while maybe they'd had some ideas about how to incorporate Australiana into their movie, the move to "Mexico" is startlingly cosmetic.) What is very hard to believe, however, is that the Tremors II they wrote would've had anything like the same story as the Tremors II we got, because the Tremors II we got is one of the most "do it again, but smaller" sequels you'll ever see in your life, a monster flick reorienting itself towards a lower budget in such fundamental and active ways I don't understand what the $17 million version of it could've looked like. Now, get it straight: this is no condemnation of Tremors II, an enjoyable movie—a movie rarely as good as Tremors, but that's a bar few films in general clear—that's approaching the challenge of being a sequel with one-third the budget with a lot of nerve and some brains. But even though we're talking about a DTV sequel here, it is one of the better-loved examples of its type, so if I told you I was disappointed by Tremors II, there's one big reason why I might be.
One thing about it that isn't a disappointment, as such, is that it's going to initially wander off from its genre: I spent some effort insisting that Tremors was "proper horror," and "horror" can mean many things, but one of the better definitions I've ever heard is that it's the collision of the normal with the abnormal, the known and the unknown; and, after a fashion, it's clever how utterly Wilson & Maddock wallow in the fact that after Tremors those worm-like man-eating burrowing monsters called graboids would, indeed, be known, in a way largely at odds with making horror out of them anymore. That doesn't mean that Earl Bassett (Ward) supposes he'd enjoy fighting them again, but we catch back up with Earl anyway, what one surmises is four years (though it could be six) after the worms came to Perfection, NV, and since Earl's adventure, he's fucked up, having squandered what opportunities came his way. His last reserves have apparently gone towards a ranching scheme that Wilson is editing oddly—as a joke—because you'd assume our cowboy-adjacent hero is raising horses, or cattle. But the recalcitrant creature he can't rope turns out to be an ostrich, and "ostrich farm" being the kind of "bad investment" humor that, going by my memory, was out-of-date even by '94, honestly tends to make it a little funnier in this context; though my suspicion is what this actually is is foreshadowing the shape that the horror part of this action-horror movie (still not horror-comedy, in overall effect, though a long stretch is comedy that drops horror more-or-less completely) is going to ultimately take. A pair of visitors approach Earl, in response to the opening scene off in the Petromaya oil fields of Mexico, where a worker (Thomas Rosales Jr) had been doing his damnedest to stay off the ground for reasons we can guess, and Wilson, whether or not he and Maddock already knew they'd written The Floor Is Lava: The Motion Picture, is now emphasizing that concept so aggressively that somebody must've told him; yet, at most, he's only making a very bleak joke out of it.
One of Earl's supplicants is the executive (Marcelo Tubert) who offers him $50,000 a worm if he plies the skills that made him hero of Perfection, and let us here acknowledge the generosity Ward's showing—there is an audible line between Earl's two visitors, "I told you, that's the other one," while the entire set-up is somewhat explicitly that Kevin Bacon has declined to be in this movie because he's organized his life better than Fred Ward—though this won't our last praise for Ward. Well, Earl accepts the offer, because what else has he got to do, and the kid who tracked him down, one Grady Hoover (Chris Gartin)—a celluloid manifestation of Tremors fandom, in the same way that Gartin feels like a distillation of the mid-90s into a single entity—now seizes his moment to declare himself Earl's sidekick, dialogue later indicating that Earl, despite this, is splitting the money with him 50/50. Because Earl, you see, is great. Shortly, they're down south, with a consignment of arms from the Ejercito Mexicano (there's even enough of a gloss on why the Mexican government can't just do this themselves that it's not actually a thorn in my side the whole movie), at a location the script just keeps insisting is "a refinery," where they meet its surviving workers, namely Pedro (José Rosario) and Julio (Marco Hernandez) and especially Kate White (Helen Shaver), an American geological engineer, who catches Earl's eye (and vice versa). Forthwith, Earl and Grady are sallying forth, using state-of-the-art seismometers and tracking technology against the graboids, and, compared to the first time, having a ball. But the worms get smarter, and their evolving tactics are not at all the limit of the surprises the monsters have in store.
So far, so good! We can bemoan Bacon's absence, and hence the absence of possibly the single best thing about Tremors, Earl's friendship with Val, but we can also turn that frown upside down because while it's "worse," it's different, and different is also good. This is true in a somewhat less complete sense with the main buddy dynamic here, though I don't actually dislike Gartin's callow unctuousness, or even Wilson & Maddock's impulses about what to do with a character who constantly threatens to turn into walking self-regarding metafiction—especially when, out here at least, it is 1996—because other than what I've already noted, plus a stray line or two, this isn't even his function, which is mainly to be the dopiest character, offer 75% of the movie any opportunity for dialogue, and do Paxtonisms when the going gets tough, but most important is what all of these things are doing combined, which is throwing Earl into greater relief.
If anything surpasses what you'd expect out of a direct-to-video Tremors II, then it's Earl. So, I'm somewhere with this: for our introduction to Kate, the film has seemingly gone to considerable trouble to make her look like a Sarah Connor cosplayer, which you'll clock instantaneously, and likely roll your eyes at. But maybe this wasn't an accident, for it struck me that Earl's Sarah Connor, or, rather, that Ward's performing the same (albeit appropriately down-scaled) feat of characterization that Linda Hamilton did for her monster movie sequel, indeed with almost the same amount of time having passed between them; that is, it's in many respects discontinuous with the performance he gave the first time, and he even looks very different,* because Tremors II has given genuine thought to how Tremors and four-to-six years would have transformed Earl, and short of Hamilton's extraordinary-but-nevertheless-natural discontinuity, it's one of the better "pick up where we are now" sequel performances I could name off the top of my head. I don't want to overemphasize it, but this is a more weathered man than we met in 1990, even "dealing with trauma" in ways that aren't going to burst through the tonal boundaries of a Tremors but are noticeable (e.g., Ward's read of the "joke" about one of his dead friends, "he named them, then they ate him"), on top of loneliness because Val's in outer space and self-recrimination because he still hasn't left the town he was going to leave even before it got leveled by monsters, and how such a man commits himself to a desperate gamble and wakes back up to life, and also simply how he's evolved as a tactician since his first lesson in worm war. (If anything's better than its Tremors counterpart, it's the romantic subplot, which, truthfully, just gets the extra five or six breaths of fresh air it needs, but is, anyway, and I think this is a bigger spoiler than anything to do with the damn graboids, the sweetest invocation of pornography in a romance I've seen lately.)
Whenever Tremors II is an unstressed character study of Earl, then, it's good, and that's the vast majority of the movie: the number of shots without Ward, or that aren't depicting Earl's perspective, is surprisingly close to "zero" in this sequel to an ensemble film with slasher-like characteristics, the only obvious exception being those attending the wealthy, fatuous survivalist Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) reentering the fray at Earl's request. (Burt is still much fun, but maybe they only thought they had the juice to care about two returning characters, because the way they dispense with McEntire's Mrs. Gummer is fairly lazy, and if Gross has considered how Burt's changed, it's difficult to tease this out of his performance, which is pretty much just the same cartoon as previous. Which slightly worries me, yes.)
Clearly, I'm not as high on everything else here even if it is sharing space with Ward, but for a long spell, it's only minor complaints: Wilson does not evidence all the keener instincts that Underwood had for how to place and move the camera, and thanks to a giant grassland rather than a scorched desert, the entire visual complexion is different, which ought to be commendable, though my true thoughts are in this case "it's different and therefore worse," particularly when, despite the return of Tremors' production designer Ivo Cristante, "objectively worse" is easy to come by thanks to how insanely little this ever resembles an "oil refinery," which might've been a cool place to stage action, when outside of one or two props it's barely pretending to be an oil field, or anything whatsoever. The television-sized music is likewise a downgrade, but though I prefer Tremors' score, I appreciate Jay Ferguson has a chance to play around with what Tremors' composers arguably didn't play around with enough, in the country-western-and-now-for-simplicity's-sake-let's-call-them-"Mexican" environmental cues. But, obviously, so much of this is Wilson struggling against his nothing budget, and the Tremors concept is pretty accommodating given that, for the most part, the subterranean monsters aren't meant to be seen, so even with a budget that has about 10% of the money Tremors had to render their underground action visible, Wilson figures out intelligent ways around that, like the laconic staging of the early graboid hunts that are basically a series of funny vignettes about blowing up chunks of the Santa Clara Valley (a superb callback involves an umbrella), or, once the graboids begin adapting, the Perfection sleighride they take Earl and Grady on that's essentially just somebody driving a truck in reverse while Ward and Gartin shriek on the soundtrack, but remains nicely-thrilling.
It's saving budget for what matters, however, so it's unfortunate that, to me, what "matters" is so cavalier about violating the implied contract the movie about sandworm-based destruction has signed, stating that it will, in fact, give you sandworms, and not something else that coincidentally happens to be much cheaper to realize. Like its predecessor, Tremors II operates in two phases, and precisely in the middle of its 100 minutes it shifts from sunny, even cutesy action-comedy to action-horror again, and, you can blame this on my own failures as a viewer if you like, but I have a very hard time accepting how they navigate the hump. "THE WORMS HAVE TURNED," so it says, which is pretty good, though its substance isn't. This is arguably "spoiling" a thirty-year-old movie, but what happens is that the graboids... stop being graboids. I don't think I'm being a stick-in-the-mud to find this bothersome in the movie about graboids, but they metamorphosize (Earl's word, or the word he's searching for)—or they give birth, though this is hard to square with later observations,** but then, such is the dickhead way they're establishing a "graboid life cycle"—and, regardless, the graboids become what lore calls "shriekers,"*** rather theropod-like, bipedal, and obviously aboveground monsters that have a completely different sensory suite than their worm progenitors (now they're deaf, but "see" with gross headflaps, in infrared; the eponymous behavior is just a side-effect of the animals generating heat for communication), which clumsily-expressed dialogue more-than-once suggests is a retcon for the entire species redounding back to the first Tremors, but I'm positively putting my foot down on that, though it's also the case that, as regards their social behavior, at no point are the puppeteers exceptionally careful about making sure that the headflaps are up so the shriekers could see the other shriekers shriek.
More fundamentally, I don't approve of what this does to Tremors, which had one of the great movie monsters, and yeah, that they "made sense"—the liberties previously taken being limited to the absolute requisites of making a horror movie about burrowing worms, while the tantalizing behavioral adaptations of Tremors were far more enjoyable, to me, than what feels perilously close to an organism evolving, biologically, on purpose—was part of that. But mostly it's that their replacement is infinitely more generic, except that, aesthetically, some care has been taken to make them feel graboidesque. That they're individually less-threatening is immediately apparent, so they reproduce at a ridiculous rate when provided any food, the setpieces largely revolving around food supply (predominantly actual food, given the production could afford hardly any body count characters) and their sensory gaps, with the unfortunate need, now that our monsters walk the earth, to supplement the good close-up puppets Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr are once again providing with the Tippett Studios' CGI, surprisingly well-rendered for 90s DTV fare, but composited like so much ass. The movie now perpetually stumbles, even with Wilson otherwise acquitting himself honorably—the initial tease-and-reveal is swell; there are quasi-wacky sequences involving a hotwired car and an unfinished "refinery" building, respectively, that do everything a Tremors could to demonstrate that its comedy, though funny, remains subordinate to its thrillmaking and its characters; eventually, we get a Predator riff that, for what it's worth, is less actually-silly than Predator despite looking sillier, and my favorite parts of it (a larger-than-realized bomb; especially an attempt by Earl at swashbuckling) demonstrate that aforementioned mix of 1 part comedy:2 parts thrills all over again. It's a worthy sequel, above all thanks to Ward. But I find it so conceptually objectionable that sometimes it's hard to like what's mostly only a serviceable monster matinee in the first place.
Score: 7/10
*To the extent I'm inordinately bothered by the line Earl has regarding somebody else's "skinny ass."
**Kate's jumped to "hermaphroditic autogamy" over "parthenogenesis" before she's even identified the bastard's gonads.
***That's worse than "graboid."
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