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TREMORS (1990)

Posted by Daniel Metz

Dir. Ron Underwood
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 12/1/09, 8:45pm

Terror Tuesday this week highlighted a film from the distorted childhood of many people of my generation. The basic premise is simple: a secluded town is disrupted when four earth-mutant-wormy things start causing some trouble by eating people and trucks and house corners. If this premise sounds similar, it is for one of two reasons:

1. You saw it on cable in the middle 1990s.
2. You go to Terror Tuesday as much as I do, and you recently saw Blood Beach.

Hopefully, you fit into the latter category. Blood Beach was much funnier, and the effect of humans being sucked into the sand was much worse and therefore more enjoyable to watch. Whereas the 1980 film used stop motion and creative sand distribution to achieve the cheesy effect, this film used real expensive special effects that really shock you.

The film is a western, unlike its beach-horror Jaws-ripoff superior. It is set against the emotionally-charged backdrop of mountains and sandy rock. I think the film is set in Nevada, in a town overcompensatingly titled “Perfection.” The generic play between western, monster movie, and atmospheric horror does create some nice moments. Overall, though, the uninspired direction of Ron Underwood, who decided to make a film with absolutely no style, leaves the exteriors lacking and the characters fairly lifeless. There is excitement, yes, but how hard is it, really, to create an exciting scene?

Tremors reminded me of a number of films. After all, it is a typical instance of man vs. nature, and that duality is well represented in film history. I think the classic example is The Birds, the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece of horror thru avian attack. The one problem I always had with that film was the ending; after being terrified and trapper in a home, Tippi Hedron and gang escape Bodega Bay by simply walking slowly away. This always seemed anticlimactic to me.

In Tremors, they discover the same solution. The survivors of Perfection get into a “caterpillar,” which is some sort of a construction vehicle, and drive very slowly out of town. In watching this scene, I began to realize what Hitchcock was saying with his film. Nature is fighting back because humans don’t treat it right, and the solution is to, literally and figuratively, tread softly.

As I started soaking up this insight, I realized that this film did not have the class that The Birds has. The green truce struck by the humans and the wormies could not be maintained as it was in the Hitchcock film, but instead they attack again in the middle of the protagonists’ slow departure. Thankfully, with the help of the survivalists Reba McEntire and father-on-”Family Ties” Micahel Gross, the heroes use homemade pipe bombs to destroy their foes.

Oh, one thing to note is the little girl in this film is played by Ariana Richards. She was also the girl in Jurassic Park, as well as in Angus, and she represented my first crush in elementary school. Here, however, she was not enticing.

I am not accustomed to watching films from the 1990s, so this was a departure for me. One thing I hated about this movie was the music, a thumping country-desert hybrid. There were also scene-change snappy lines, a contrived device with poor jokes. One typical example, in which Kevin Bacon explains to his partner Fred Ward why he chooses the women he does:

Kevin Bacon: I’m a victim of circumstances.
Fred Ward: I thought it was your pecker.

ha ha.