TREMORS
1990
Directed by Ron Underwood
Written by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock
Halloween beckons, and I wanted to do something more substantial to celebrate it than I did last year with the Amityville "trilogy"—something more like Halloween 2024, when we considered the Fridays and Nightmares in their fullness—and I still have some plans for another franchise horror retrospective of that nature, though truthfully I had plans for two, because it was not the original plan to get sucked into the hole called Tremors. But that's what happened, even if that franchise is not robustly "horror," given its comedic embroidery, preference for action over dread, and the fact it started out as a PG-13 wannabe-blockbuster in the 90s (not a decade for robust horror) while its six, theoretically more-liberated direct-to-video sequels (even as a franchise, it's only as robust as one released almost-entirely on DVD and streaming gets) all for whatever reason got their own MPAA ratings, and they too operated within the same weenie bandwidth, except for Tremors 3, which got a PG without a 13.
Myself, I think there's little ambiguity that Tremors—the 1990 film—is good and proper horror, but what that fast-and-dirty summation of its franchise history might imply is that it was no immediate success, and it wasn't, Tremors either disappointing or flopping depending on which numbers you accept ($16 million gross on a budget of $5-12 million, though I'll enthusiastically declare I scarcely deem even the latter figure credible). It slunk defeated out of theaters before the vernal equinox of 1990—for Universal Pictures, in their wisdom, released this sun-baked action-horror on January 19th, competing against a crowd of still-playing prestige flicks for two market quadrants, and against the resumption of compulsory education for the rest—and yet Tremors was destined to become legendary, saved by home video to achieve the status of the very first cult classic of the 90s, with its eventual sequels becoming one of the most prominent names of the Golden Age of Direct-To-Video Release, prompted by the fans who'd bought and rented and re-rented copies of Tremors to watch it over and over. How it avoided me is impossible to say, but I've been trying to make up for lost time, because it is the kind of movie you can watch twice in four days, and not feel like you've come close to exhausting it.
Tremors didn't come out of precisely nowhere, but, like its monsters, it did emerge from obscurity, the brainchild of a trio consisting of its screenwriters, Steven Seth Wilson and Brent Maddock, and its director, Ron Underwood (also receiving a story-by credit), whose association with Wilson and Maddock went back to cranking out educational content together for television. Wilson and Braddock had "made it" before their friend had, their current claim to fame being the Short Circuits, plus credits on *batteries not included.* Now hot-tish properties, the pair returned to their notes and rediscovered the idea that had come to them when they were out documenting a desert, and they'd taken to resting on a big rock, this idea being, "what if there were something under the ground, and if they got off the rock, it'd eat them," fleshed-out a little bit even then with their once-and-future director. They called it Land Sharks, and thankfully SNL took that name for a sketch so it couldn't stick. Now comes somebody who was already important, producer Gale Anne Hurd, and Hurd liked their idea, as well she would've when she'd just made a fortune off Aliens, and while both Jaws On Land and Aliens On Earth would be reductive, even misleading framings, I don't think the biggest Tremors fan (or Wilson and Maddock themselves) would argue too strenuously that this double-barreled elevator pitch doesn't get you pretty far, and further still if you added Dune But a Monster Movie. Being decent sorts, Wilson and Braddock lobbied to give Underwood his feature debut, and they did good by their friend: despite Tremors' commercial disappointment, it kicked off one of either the luckiest or unluckiest directorial careers of the 90s, depending on how you look at it. As for his good luck, he was blessed to have this much career, considering he made literally one successful movie in his entire tenure in theatrically-released films—this being Tremors' follow-up, City Slickers, something I find cute insofar as the joke that they're kinda the same movie would scan—but it's unfortunate, even if it's not undeserved (I had remembered Heart and Souls being good, but...), that Underwood's entire positive legacy is one now-vaguely-recalled zeitgeist hit and one widely-beloved rehabilitated bomb.**
But in 1990 he came out the gate screaming, so let us turn to morning in Perfection, NV, a very small town in the middle of a one-road valley, walled off on two sides by mountains and another by the termination of its plateau by a giant cliff. From that cliff urinates one Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon, evidently the man for kicking off long-running horror franchises, though his powers must've diminished considering there's no They/Them/Theirs), who wakes up his colleague Earl Bass (Fred Ward) so they can start their day of crappy odd-jobs in a local economy consisting of apparently nothing besides whatever purchases have been made lately by the new seismology researcher Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), whom Val and Earl meet on their chore circuit and who asks them, receiving only confused negatives, if they know why she's been getting such strange readings. We could tell her, but Val and Earl go obliviously on with their day, sniping at each other about their deferred mutual dream of finding new lives in Bixby, a town which may number in the hundreds, and even have, for instance, a sewer system; and, having egged one another on, they determine that today's the day they escape.
Discovering, on three separate attempts to leave, their neighbors' corpses derails this plan, and on the third try, they get a clue when they find a large, snake-like organism attached to their truck. On their fourth try, although at this point they're just going to get help and they've been reduced to doing it on horseback, they're made fully aware of Perfection's situation: that "snake-like organism" (which evidently nobody closely examined) was merely one of the tongue-tentacles of a giant sandworm, as they would've called them if the residents of Perfection knew of Frank Herbert, though it is eventually dubbed "a graboid," a burrowing creature thirty feet in length, capable of both patient stealth and astounding sprints through the alluvial soil in its quest to consume anything and everything it "sees," or rather hears, from under the ground. Miraculously, Val and Earl kill their attacker, tricking it—by accident—into smashing itself into a concrete culvert. Their triumph is witnessed by Rhonda, who nonetheless brings some bad news, correlating the existence of this unknown monster with her data, and determining that there are four more still out there, one of which finds our trio immediately. Even when they finally escape, the worms will have followed them, and they're getting smarter all the time, developing a rough understanding of human infrastructure's strengths and weaknesses, so, eventually, even standing on the roofs isn't going to preserve them.
So, clearly, this is only a calendar accident of a 90s film, and in many, even most ways this remains "of the 1980s," in its straightforwardness and loveable-loser leads—and production methods—and what we've got is very much a continuation of the 80s' trend of remaking 50s science fiction, so much of which hailed from Universal-International so it remains a pleasure to see their globe open this film, in a contemporary idiom: fewer stolid scientists, though Rhonda fulfills that function; gnarlier, even at a PG-13; and with thirty-plus more years of effects technology to call upon. The main caveat is that instead of remaking any specific 50s sci-fi flick, Tremors is remaking all of them, or at least a giant slice of them, what feels like three dozen separate movies, starting with Them!, about giant monsters haunting the American Desert. Not that Tremors commits to any post-Trinity origin: one of the neater bits of texture involves our stranded heroes tabling every hypothesis as a way of passing the time and exerting some slight psychological control over their situation, without any means of finding out within the confines of this story, where just figuring out how to survive the monsters' own iterative tactics is their sole priority.
On the other hand, we observe it shares a year with Arachnophobia, another personal favorite that itself is "of the 1980s," and obviously hugely similar (besides a middle-class hero, the biggest difference might be the valence of their respective spectacles, offering a splendid choice between practical effects work and real damn animals), but also somewhat pointing ahead, together making 1990 the year of "the thrillomedy," the ugly marketing term coined for Arachnophobia, predicting that horror's fate in this decade was to be frivolous, even contemptuous, which to some degree came true. Tremors, I noted, is often deemed "horror-comedy," and I'd like to dissent on this, when that phrase should indicate a movie that doesn't take itself seriously, and nothing about Tremors is not taken seriously, up to and including characters who simply happen to be funny. What you get is horror that absolutely remains horrifying—I'll accept "action-horror," once it shifts to its war-of-the-worms mode—partly because you've come to like the characters who keep finding dead bodies and keep getting almost eaten by the giant worm puppets filled with pumpkin pie.
So bigger laughs and quite possibly more laughs than most true comedies, though it's at least as much a strategy to engage you with its characters, Val and Earl being one of the all-timer idiot-bro duos, that, even so, the movie still only ever wants to meet on their own level. It would have a hard time doing anything else thanks to the somehow-only-lightly-caricatured, lived-in earthiness (the first thing we see anybody do is pee, the second is Val digging deeply into his ass chasing an itch, and the third is Earl falling out the back of a truck) and the combative masculine warmth that Bacon and Ward have established as soon as the (also terrific) cut-out title card has flown away. They map some pretty nice distinctions—Val is younger and hungrier and thinks he's smarter; Earl is older and, indeed, wiser; they're both "better than Perfection," though it would take a lot to be worse; most of the distinction is down to Bacon's drawl being brittler than Ward's (so it's more like "GODDAYUM PLAYUN!")—but they're basically the same, given to the pleasant and appealingly-organic habit, subsequent to comic backbiting (later, terrified flailing), of solving their numerous disputes with the unappealable judgment of rock-paper-scissors. The rapport between the actors is so excellent that if Brokeback Mountain were more like this, I'd actually find that movie effective, and sufficiently excellent that by the two-thirds mark Underwood has realized that with nothing besides a series of silent singles he can have Earl offer his consent to the affection developing between Val and Rhonda—he can accordingly delete an earlier-set scene belaboring feelings with words—and though Earl's had the goal of correcting his pal's shallow rutting, and has, by dint of worm, seemingly achieved this mission, thanks to Ward this scene is fucking wistful, too, because Ward understands on Earl's behalf that this also calls into question the future of his friendship. (Though as far as deleted scenes go, I wish the movie kept its original ending rather than surrendering to test audiences who couldn't understand romance without heavy petting, because one of the few things I don't like is how the reshot ending awkwardly forces a culmination to a relationship it could never have done more than imply; the original ending is barely more nebulous, but leaves it to the imagination, and also included Ward's swell read, "You don't get to decide if you're worthless, she does." I suppose I also disapprove of the idea that Carter, even unflatteringly-arrayed, isn't on par with Val's dream girls—was Steven Weber in the habit of marrying sixes? I don't think so.)
Ward and Bacon plus Carter are the core, then, but joined by a fine ensemble. That includes downtown Perfection's comparatively-minor characters (Victor Wong's shopkeeper; Charlotte Stewart's local single mother and a not-that-I-recognized-her Ariana Richards-from-before-Jurassic Park as her daughter; Tony Geraro and Richard Marcus as other inhabitants; Bobby Jacoby's aggravating tween who, weirdly, appears to belong to none of them), plus a smattering of body count figures on the periphery who establish the threat, though other than some county workers (not even excluding the dialogue-free corpses), nobody ever feels unimportant, which is one of the outstanding things here. The movie is awfully good about establishing its community even in the midst of Val and Earl's attempts to quit it—it's even better than that at the literal business of building it, with Perfection being a completely bespoke creation of breakable trick buildings courtesy production designer Ivo Cristante, raised up on a stretch of Nevada waste chosen for how its geology conformed to the plot (not even something you'd consciously notice, but it's apparently cheating very little with editing and effects in this regard—to the extent it does, that forced-perspective cliff wall is flawless—and I expect it redounds subliminally to how damned tangible Tremors feels, always benefiting enormously from the bleak desert glamor of Alexander Gruszynki's unpretentious photography and Ernest Troost and Robert Folk's score, that, by volume, is mostly Williamsisms-by-way-of-Hornerisms (an Aliens family resemblance), but gets some noticeable joy out of sneaking in the southwesternish instrumentals of a Tom Cochrane album. But then it's great about maintaining and intensifying its sense of community as the crisis unfurls, the kind movie where ideas—successful, plot-critical ideas!—get forwarded by full-on tertiary characters, whose names you'd never even learn the first time you watched it; and that's another key to Tremors' excellent vibe.
Of course, the major supporting players (one of them only "a supporting player" for now) are Burt and Heather Gummer, the paranoia-soaked doomsday preppers respectively portrayed by Michael Gross as the anti-Steven Keaton and Reba McEntire in her acting debut, bozo homesteaders who clearly have money from somewhere else and who, although they're well-liked enough, sometimes get looked askance-at even by these ruroids. The movie mocks the Gummers, arguably starting with their surname, but plays fairer with them than is imaginable in later days, or even in Tremors 2—"sure, but when the evil worms come (and they will), you'll be happy to call these psychos 'neighbor'"—notably in a bravura sequence where they're the only characters to ever beat a worm, which has unwisely busted into their arsenal, in a stand-up fight. This is what I mean when I say it evinces such judiciousness with its comedy that calling it "horror-comedy" does it some disservice; or I could as easily point to the scene where the worms effectively pants Rhonda, which sounds funny (maybe just "funny"), but it's not played as goofy, or objectifying, or anything but the solution to the barbed wire wrapped around her legs; or Val and Earl's attempted leap over that culvert which fails, "comically," but so they can see the pursuing graboid not-comically-at-all vanquish itself on the concrete.
As for how that all fits together, Underwood's subsequent career is a bafflement, when there's not much to Tremors that isn't at least approaching (ahem) perfection, starting with a drumtight structure, but not so tight it isn't packed full of interesting narrative features and terrific little visual flourishes, regardless of how "important" it is to the action-horror spectacle (one of my favorite shots in the movie is just how Val and Earl's truck is allowed to veer off at a tangent from the road without the camera following them, emphasizing the headlong thrill of the sexual pursuit Val would've preferred to being chased by worms***). Underwood's divided the movie squarely enough into two main phases, starting with the slasher-style first "act" where Val and Earl's misadventures get intercut with other characters facing the lurking fear, all oblique vignettes that mean the shaggiest-comedy stretch of the movie is also the most legitimately-horrific as the something makes itself known. Underwood affords these acts of predation a great measure of style: my very favorite shot in the movie is the canny-as-hell slow push-in on the doctor's wife (Bibi Besch) in her apparent safety after her husband's (Conrad Bachmann) been swallowed into his grave—the camera's using the space of a station wagon's wayback remarkably well—that culminates in a much-quicker pull-out when the graboid finishes its job, the car crushing under the weight of soil as it falls impossibly into the earth and its lights, and the scream, get snuffed by the dirt. (If you aren't calling that "legitimate horror," I suppose Val finding what he finds under a seemingly-mislaid hat wouldn't do it either.)
These mean-ass Mothra larvae are superlative movie monsters, it must be said, which doesn't change when the phase transitions towards more pronounced action, when, despite the sometimes-dubious digging physics and acoustics, their subterranean operation means, besides being a boon for low-mid-budget filmmaking, they're hidden even when they're there. We perceive them mostly through their consequence, and Underwood shows them exactly the right amount that we understand how powerful they are, without ever demystifying them and turning them into just a big animal. Even then, when we do see them, they're great works of craft, thanks to full-sized animatronics and puppetry, respectively, by Art Brewer's outfit and by "Amalgamated Dynamics" (ironically-named given Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr didn't have an office, let alone studio space, until Underwood's check cleared; I wouldn't necessarily recommend watching behind-the-scenes footage of Tremors as it makes moviemaking look so silly), and miniature work from Robert and Dennis Skotak, Cameron's guys (naturally). The amazing part is how seamlessly the joins fit, with perhaps only one single image (they were, admirably-enough, committed to compositing the Gummers' fusillade into at least one shot with an actual graboid) that isn't finessed into complete verisimilitude.**** (As for Bacon actually punching one of the mechanical tongue-tentacle props, it is—needless to say—sublime, and while I'm sure it was planned meticulously, it speaks to the performance's immediacy that it's indistinguishable from the actor responding reflexively.) Of course, while they may be hidden much of the time, those "consequences" I mentioned are hellaciously rad: the movie's most impressive illusionism comes from the "how'd they even do it?" propwork (it's mostly not even that sophisticated! it's mostly just ropes!), the worms shaking the buildings and pulling objects through the ground like it was a fluid, and there's a wave effect through a boardwalk that I, personally, fell in love with. The flexibility of the effects talent must've been enormously freeing, and Underwood, Wilson, and Braddock exploit that freedom to the hilt, so despite the graboids seemingly being confined to a fairly-limited repertoire, there's never really a stereotypical "Tremors sequence" that develops at any point in these 96 minutes, even when having "the floor is lava" as any movie's basic foundation obviously threatens a certain repetitiveness. That the floor might be lava, but the lava is an active, halfway-intelligent force, plus the chairs are also sinking in it, helps; and Tremors achieves the miracle of being a genuinely character-driven thriller that is nevertheless almost nothing except setpieces after a certain (and fairly early) point, and then the setpieces themselves are all different, clever, and cool.
Much to like, then, and almost nothing not to; my most substantive complaint is that, earlier than you'd think, it stops accruing a body count (for some reason even that dipshit kid, who's been positively marked for death, survives), which hurts my "it is too a horror movie" thesis, but supports my "it's a great survival thriller about a tight-knit community" thesis—so my very least-favorite thing is that for thirty seconds nearing the climax, the handymen and the Gummers exchange stressful words over leadership, not ever a subject the movie's been "about," and the movie doesn't find the space for them to apologize—but however we want to categorize it, Tremors rocks. It's a movie that's fun and thrilling and almost-uniquely good-natured, on top of how it's a showcase for how much you could do with special effects in 1990 even without a ton of money, if you had the vision and the skill. It earns its cult as correctly as any movie I could name; if I'd seen this in 1990, it'd be one of my favorite movies ever, and, hey, the worms ain't got me yet, it could still get there.
Score: 10/10
*I called that film one of the 80s' most jam-packed incubators of future talent even without knowing who Wilson & Braddock were, but I've since corrected the omission.
**I cannot at present speak to the catastrophe that effectively ended Underwood, The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
***It's not a metaphor, though I certainly adore the bizarre symmetry between the opening shot and the climax, which is heading in the direction of a Goddamn gonzo metaphor, thankfully without getting there.
****The only actually-bad effects here, oddly-enough, are a couple of downright-terrible "starry skies" landscape composites.
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