TREMORS 3: BACK TO PERFECTION
2001
Directed by Brent Maddock
Written by Nancy Roberts, S.S. Wilson, Brent Maddock, and John Whelpley
The Tremors franchise was a labor of love for the folks at Stampede Entertainment, namely S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock (its co-creators) and Nancy Roberts (a co-founder of Stampede, but not germane to our narrative until she received her first Tremors writing credit here). And one act of devotion they made to their franchise was their promotional website, and it could bring a smile to your heart to witness Wilson answer Tremors fans' "frequently asked questions," even the piddly and stupid ones, as affably, as thoroughly, and as candidly you're ever likely to see a filmmaker do. Unfortunately, what those nerds didn't ask—or, perhaps, what Wilson didn't deign to answer—are very many questions regarding Tremors 3: Back To Perfection as an actual motion picture manufactured by an actual business concern. And so I can't tell you anything more than what's already apparent from the movie's basic data: in 2001—fully five years after Tremors II: Aftershocks, so not capitalizing on its apparent success with any serious urgency—they released the second direct-to-video sequel to Tremors. I'd like to imagine the gap was because they'd not really intended a Tremors 3 when they made the already long-deferred Tremors II (for this is true), but then they had this really great idea, and that's how long it took to badger Universal into making their idea a reality.
Which somewhat smashes its head against the wall of Back To Perfection, which is already telling you what's going on with that lovely, but not necessarily hugely-inspiring, subtitle: it's a movie that has no enormously compelling reason to be, besides being another Tremors adventure in a series that wasn't even financially viable enough to have theatrical releases. It's not going bigger, even if it might imagine it does: Back To Perfection, which cost less than Aftershocks, isn't even quite big enough to have gotten itself back to the original film's shooting location in Inyo County, and the one thing I do know about its production was that it was fast and cheap.
But, you know, this isn't a crime—nothing wrong with "another adventure." That's even quaint these days (hell, it manages a measure of "trilogy"-like closure), and it's not really as repetitive as all that. Indeed, one thing that was going to keep it from being repetitive, whether you liked it or not, was that Fred Ward, co-star of Tremors and star of Aftershocks, was not to return; thus, just as they had in 1996, they went down the chain-of-command, to Michael Gross, who'd essayed fan-favorite survivalist Burt Gummer in the previous two films. Maybe this was even always their first idea, but I wasn't too enthused: Ward was, not-very-secretly, the best part of the first Tremors' ensemble, and the way Ward used the years between the two movies as part of his performance in Aftershocks made him the single biggest reason the sequel was good at all. Gross, on the other hand, was pretty much the one note—he likes guns; or two notes, if you count "anti-government conspiracy theorist" as a different note, but I don't know why you would—and Burt was, obviously, a useful character, narratively-speaking, and good comic relief with an unforgettable beat built around him in each previous film, none of which meant he was prime material for the protagonist of the next, while his particular manner (his character is "reveling in the violent crisis that's shown everybody that his mental illness was always rational," but his manner has been "a know-it-all prattling away in militaryese") perhaps even recommended against it. But hey, King of the Hill's Dale Gribble episodes are the best; could the same not be true of this series? Given that there's essentially zero possibility for any Tremors sequel to be better than the first, obviously not. But they did figure out how to make Burt into the protagonist.
Some of that actually is Gross and the screenplay (the story's by the Stampede partners, though the script is by John Whepley) successfully pulling back on Burt's ravenous appetite for destruction—this is, ah, not instantaneously apparent in the opening scene in Argentina, wherein Burt ecstatically obliterates a tactically-unproficient wave of shriekers with anti-aircraft artillery (like Aftershocks' ostriches, it's foreshaaaadowing)—and since that's probably going too far, then, they're at least modulating it more. Either way, coming back home to Perfection, NV, he's purged some of his killer instinct (or maybe there was no challenge to the combat), so Gross can, now, start shading a slight but crucial ambivalence, even a certain over-this-shit tiredness, onto Burt, and whether that fully tracks, he is a divorcé who lives alone in his fortress in a town of five. It makes a more approachable hero, and it's a good, subtle shift. But I started saying that's only some of it. Most of it is that the film's solution for Burt is to simply surround him with even broader caricatures, arguably all of them obnoxious (and one of them embodied by the first outrightly bad performance in a Tremors), and even with the surprising return of so many Tremors 1 actors, an inhumanity has seeped into the ensemble and the tone, and what everybody said the series always was, and which I previously spent a fair amount of effort denying, has happened: it's a comedy now. Maybe not foremost, but only because it's still a sci-fi actioner foremost. It's not not horror, but mostly it's "horror" by inheritance; it's not horror the way Tremors was horror, and not even horror the way Aftershocks replanted its feet in horror. Of course, those are just the foundational reasons for why Back To Perfection feels different. There's a much simpler litmus test that this movie is going to provide, and whether you consider it to have passed or failed depends, I guess, on what exactly it is you want out of a Tremors DTV sequel.
So: Burt's back home, and Perfection's a little different than we left it, though I'm not sure how much of that's "the buildings were rendered uninhabitable, as you saw, and only three of them were rebuilt because no one here has any money except Burt," and how much is just that we've got one-fifth the budget of the first film, so everything seems underdressed. Well, Chang's store is still here but now it's run by his daughter Jodi (Susan Chuang); the Sterngoods are still around, mom Nancy (Charlotte Stewart) and college drop-out daughter Mindy (Ariana Richards), along with Miguel (Tony Genaro); and the economy of Perfection has coalesced around the residual fame brought to the community by the events of 1990, with drawling, entrepreneurial newcomer Jack (Shawn Christian) and his slow-witted, creepy assistant Buford (Billy Rieck) having established a threadbare touring business involving low-rent illusionism to give visitors the thrill of getting chased by a graboid, this being one of the movie's most charming ideas—effectively, it's watching Tremors behind-the-scenes footage—though the script spends so long being about this that you can tell at some point the writers must've been toying with a Tremors Park, and when they swerved what they left behind was enough to make the first twenty minutes feel like a reference joke with no punchline. Well, believe it or not, the reports of the graboids' permanent expurgation have been exaggerated, and during one of Jack's tours one of those worms makes itself known, swallowing Buford, threatening the guests, and putting the townsfolk into a tizzy, only to be met by men from the government, here to help. They inform them that killing the graboids is against the Endangered Species Act, but they'll be happy to give the Perfectionites fair market value for their property when they exercise eminent domain over the town and clear them all out.
This sitcom satire turns out to be little besides an inciting incident, and an excuse for some some extra body count characters (of sorts: their troubles all happen offscreen in a way that resembles comedy—they return, more than once, defeated and bedraggled from their attempts to capture a live graboid, for science—though it's hard not to notice that showing these scenes would've also been expensive). It does, however, give our right-wing paranoiac something to hurl his personality against, and in 2001 Burt's paleo-libertarian conspiracism remains cute enough. (Meanwhile, what I didn't mention at all is that Melvin (Robert Jayne), the annoying kid from the first film, has matured into an annoying adult, specifically an annoying real estate developer who has, against all logic, determined to bring suburban renewal to the wasteland of his birth; and therefore, with awe-inspiring elegance, the two subplots that never mattered negate each other in the end.) Sneering at the nanny state ineptitude on display, Burt cuts a deal with the g-men: if he can get them the live graboid they want, he'll have the government's blessing to exterminate the rest, and the Department of the Interior will leave Perfection in peace. Now, with that in mind, I bet it sounds like those subplots matter, and it's very "put on a show to save the threatened piece of real estate" in its generic sturdiness. But as I'm sure Burt would observe, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and this plan flies straight out the window once we're reminded that graboids don't stay graboids, they become shriekers, and now we learn that shriekers don't stay shriekers, either, they become...
Yeah, alright. They become ass-blasters.
Obviously, this isn't that enjoyable to hear over and over, and its primary value is just demonstrating (along with numerous other bad words) how much swearing you could apparently put into a movie the MPAA would still award a PG rating. I'm not totally sure it had the potential to be funny briefly: even when the name is coined (I suppose I appreciate Jodi keeping up Chang family tradition by getting to name the monster), the button is "sounds like a porno film," which isn't actually a joke ("Ah think ah own that tape" in Jack's drawl would be a joke). But I guess it comes by it honestly—their asses do, indeed, blast, and this stage of the graboid life-cycle (Tremors did the larva, Aftershocks the annoying, theropod-like pupal stage, and now we have, in its glory, the graboid imago) can fly, their giant bodies assisted in their lift-off with rocket-propelled farts, seemingly achieved through some kind of metallic sodium refined in their guts, and, hey, it makes an effective solution to the rankling biodynamics problem of how an azhdarcid-sized animal like this one ever possibly gets aloft in the first place, the bane of paleontologists for years. And with the introduction of graboid eggs, we're in a place where they're putting a seal on graboid biology, which is relieving enough that I can appreciate what sense their life-cycle does still manage to make, rather than just being purely irritated that the governing philosophy of this film series that predated Jurassic Park by three years appears to have been to replicate that franchise's bestiary one movie at a time with off-brand, graboid-skinned versions of its monsters.
I'm late, then, but let's call it: on a basic level, this is actually a better movie than Aftershocks. Which is to say, without regard to Ward's performance in Aftershocks, this is the better monster matinee: the shriekers are virtually sidelined and the ass-blasters (a pterosaur by any other name would smell as sweet) are a nearly-total improvement; and even the worms are threatening again, picking up any first-half slack that might've otherwise snuck in; and I, at least, was glad to be back in something acting like a desert even if this desert is only ever "parts of Los Angeles County slightly arider than the ones we shot the last movie in." So I'll bitch some more, but only to explain why the score I'm going to give it isn't higher. First, we do have those characters, and the strategy to make Burt seem like the least frivolous amongst them: they're not bad company, exactly, though Jack's the only one I'd even hesitantly describe as "good," Christian attacking the role with that Southernistic accent, and the script counterpoising his hick huckster stereotype with traits from a different stereotype (he's explicitly "Zen") in a way I found largely okay, and also keeps him from accidentally becoming a full-on retread of Grady from the last one; Mindy mostly doesn't get to be in the movie, which is sort of "a joke" given they've set up a romantic triangle with her as the notional third point between Jack and Jodi—not exactly "ha-ha" funny—which means that to the extent she can even be "a stereotype" it's mostly in her aggressively, parodically late-90s costume design (e.g., torn wide-legged jeans duct-taped together); and Jodi escapes being an ethnic stereotype solely on the basis of her character making no sense, a hard-working, hyper-capitalistic MBA from San Francisco insistent on running the general store in the dead-not-dying town her father didn't love terribly much, which is why he sent her to San Francisco, and Chuang gives that one "outrightly bad performance" I mentioned. A below-the-waterline stand-up comedian, it shows, and the script was evidently written, or re-written, to bend towards the temptation such a performer presents, with far too many dialogues and scenes ending with Chuang deflating them with some disengaged, quippy comment; she's by no means the only reason this stays mostly out of "horror," but she's often on hand to smother even the incipient sensation of it.
But still: serviceable. So it's probably as much down to how embarrassingly cheap it is, and nevertheless obliged to do things that even an A-picture in 2001 could've dropped the ball on, and often did. The practical effects are still mostly good—they're still from Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr—so to the extent the movie can endeavor to frame its (hm) ass-blasters into closer shot scales, they're pretty great, but we do have a different concept now, and that concept does not lend itself quite as well to concealing these monsters. They're also not "endeavoring" as much as they probably should've: there's a remarkable amount of worm CGI in this movie, and it looks equally terrible; Aftershocks' problem with its CGI was primarily compositing, but the downgrade they had to make with VFX vendors here means that every aspect of it is bad, and dispiriting to look at, on top of how obvious it is that the VFX had to be edited on videotape, so the movie is frequently declaring (sometimes far ahead of time) when your ass is about to get blasted. There are design issues that weren't even forced by the VFX: for no good reason (an inspiration from rocketplanes, I'd imagine) they gave them these stubby little wings that, I'm afraid, look pretty dumb, even when the idea (a mash-up of spinosaur-like head and neck with pterosaur capabilities) was otherwise good. And then there's the direction: Maddock took that particular credit here, and it's probably not hugely worthwhile to try finding the distinctions in directorial sensibility between the one long-partnered producer-writer and the other long-partnered producer-writer also there on set, but it is, anyway, worse-directed than Aftershocks, less nimble and less able to find the most effective stagings, and vastly more willing to fall back on previously-established ideas; it at least gets its incompetence out early, with the first graboid attack being edited so ass-backwardsly that the suspense-building "Buford throws the knife rhythmically into the ground, attracting the graboid" part comes after we've already seen the graboid heading his way. (The best scene in the first half, involving Burt actually swallowed by a graboid, isn't incompetent, but it's sure not the most pristine example of storytelling clarity.) Plus we can blame it on budget but they had to have known that Kevin Kiner's score full of stock music was terrible, acceptable with Burt's militaristic motif, but usually much worse, this movie (set in the Southwestern Desert) spending so much time in Generic Techno Hell that I began to believe the closing credits (Stampede's font doesn't help) were about to make an anti-piracy statement, and remind me I wouldn't download a graboid.
And yet: it starts genuinely working halfway through, perhaps exactly when the ass-blasters show up, or possibly a little later, after you've rolled it over in your head whether the phrase "ass-blaster" requires summarily rejecting the entire film. It is, anyway, somewhat the opposite of Aftershocks (that movie's new monster mostly hurt it), and it's here that new ideas and novel remixes become ascendant. I can say exactly when the movie got me permanently onto its good side, and it is, in fact, a purely comedic moment, when it's revealed to our hero just a little too late to be useful a secret weakness of the enemy, which he now can no longer exploit, because through no fault of his own he's foreclosed the possibility of exploiting it, doing so through the exact same overprepared badassery that's supposed to make him cool; and it is hilarious and it ups the action-thriller stakes at the same time, the way a Tremors ought to. I'm a pretty big fan of the boat chase in this desert, and there's a similar low-rent cleverness to the action throughout that makes me smile; the after-dark finale in a junkyard is more-or-less unimpeachable,* the newfound claustrophobia that allows the effects to remain mostly practical working together with the ass-blasting pyrotechnics and the explicitly-MacGyversque ingenuity of our heroes to give us a fairly intense action climax. I went into Back To Perfection with few particular hopes ("maybe it'll have more subterranean monster action... maybe") and it kind of did the opposite of fulfilling that, and the prioritization of comedy over other concerns isn't great. But come the last forty minutes, I can't deny having a good time.
Score: 6/10
*Not including our paranoiac's decision to wear a Chekhovian watch that broadcasts his position, which is some damned clumsy screenwriting, though the pay-off to the bad set-up is worthwhile enough.
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