I originally saw Tremors (1990, directed by Ron Underwood) when it was in theaters and then never afterwards. I may have seen bits of it when it was on television, but I don't remember ever sitting down to watch the whole thing in the thirty-five years since. I remember renting the hell out of it when I was running a video store, which was maybe a sign that it should be in the rotation for Halloween. It was popular. It's still popular if the response to me watching it on social media is any indication. One of my friends calls it a masterpiece. Another claims that it's the anti-A24 horror movie. I can see that. The monsters in Tremors are purely the embodiment of a hostile universe, and not some metaphor for trauma or grief or whatever or whatever other literary therapy themes art horror likes to weave into their metaphors these days. Moreover, Tremors is antithetical to the middlebrow horror of our own age in which the nuclear family under threat is the ultimate horror bogey. The graboids in Tremors are none of that. They hearken to an older storytelling tradition, when our ancestors gathered around the campfire to hear stories of mighty heroes slaying monsters. Admittedly, we don't really have "mighty heroes" in this movie, but Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward as our two protagonists will do in a pinch. Tremors is old fashioned in another way, too: it's nothing but fun.
Our story follows Val McKee and Earl Bassett, two handymen who pursue their trade in the desert around the town of Perfection, Nevada, population 14. The town is small, a flyspeck on the map, and isolated by the mountains that surround the desert valley. There is no line of sight for radio communications. Val and Earl know everyone in town except for Rhonda LeBeck, the new seismologist, who they encounter out in the desert setting up seismographs. There has been unusual seismic equipment. She doesn't have an explanation. Val is in the market for a girlfriend, but Rhonda hardly seems his type. Earl razzes him over his preference for blonde hair and big tits. Rhonda, by contrast, is sporty and bookish. Soon after, Val and Earl find Old Fred up on an electric tower. Thinking he's drunk, Val climbs the tower to wake him up, only to find that he's dead from dehydration. Other people are disappearing, too, and soon it becomes apparent that there's something under the ground, some creature that's hungry and hunting. It's attracted to vibrations, so when work crews come to repair the damage done to the town's communications and roads, it's a free lunch for the monsters. Val and Earl are the first ones to see them up close, and they drive around warning residents. Val chases one of the creatures into the wall of a concrete culvert where it bashes into the side of it and winds up dead. They end up stranded on some rocks with Rhonda, in the same predicament as Old Fred. The three of them observe that the monsters--giant worm creatures they call graboids--hunt by vibration. The trio improvise a means of traveling from rock to rock by pole vaulting, and manage to drive into town ahead of the worms. Soon enough, the graboids come to town, chasing all of the residents onto their roofs. The townspeople who seem best equipped to deal with the graboids are the Gummers, a pair of doomsday preppers with an arsenal in their shelter, which comes in handy when the graboids come up under the foundations. There are three graboids left in the desert, and the townsfolk need to out-think the graboids before they are all eaten one by one...
Tremors is a monster movie with a pretty good monster. The graboids are a cross between the sand worms one finds in Beetlejuice with the OG item from Dune, and their environment means that the plot of the film devolves into an elaborate game of "the floor is lava". I found myself thinking of that line Fatboy Slim swiped from Dune for "Weapon of Choice:" "Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm." If the filmmakers had found a way to incorporate a dancing Christopher Walken into the film I would have died happy, but "Weapon of Choice" was ten years in the future when it was made. In spite of having pretty good monsters, the key to the film's appeal is its leading pair of actors, Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, and of the extended cast. Their characters are earthy and smart, a kind of blue collar version of Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy. The writers provide them both with wit, nuance, and tics on which to hang their characters. I love that they solve a lot of their disagreements with rock, paper, scissors by way of a running gag. That they are both funny helps the film immeasurably. That they both have by god movie star charisma helps, too. We get to know and like them both as people long before we meet the graboids. The same is true of the film's other important characters, from Rhonda the Seismologist to Chang the store owner to Mindy the girl on the pogo stick to the Gummers. The Gummers are first class scene stealers as played by Michael Gross and Reba McIntire (THAT Reba McIntire), a couple who love their guns maybe more than they love each other. Chang is played by Victor Wong, an actor who was ubiquitous in 80s-era genre filmmaking (he was a favorite of John Carpenter). Mindy was played by Arianna Richards who was soon to encounter some dinosaurs thanks to Stephen Spielberg. Film directors say that casting is the most important part of their job and this film shows how casting can pay huge dividends. There is a downside to this when it comes to Tremors, though. Having populated the film with indelible and likeable characters, one doesn't dare kill any of them off. All of the victims in this film have no significant scenes. They are the equivalent of red shirts. This does not fulfill Joe Bob Briggs's definition of a drive-in classic, where "Anyone can die at any moment." You aren't going to get Sam Jackson abruptly eaten by a shark here. But that hardly matters. What's fun about the film is watching Val and Earl and Rhonda think about their problems. There's a moment near the end of the film when Val is stranded in no man's land with a graboid nearby where he says aloud "this thing ain't smarter than me" and then lets Val think himself to a way to destroy the monster. Solving problems is one of the most satisfying parts of being human, after all, and this movie is deliberate about giving its characters the information, piece by piece, they need to survive. It doesn't cheat. The screenplay is tight enough that it doesn't need to.
This is a rare sunlit horror movie. Ordinarily, horror movies of this type--Wake in Fright, say, or The Hitcher--use the daylight as an existential dreamscape. This film doesn't do that. Tremors is much too grounded for that. This is a simple man against nature narrative and the light is just that: nature. This is set in the desert in the grand tradition of the monster movies of the 1950s. Are the graboids the result of atomic bombs? Maybe. The film never provides an actual origin story even though the characters speculate about this at points in the narrative. Instead, they are monsters in the desert because this is a monster movie and the desert is where monsters come from, though that's as meta as the film gets. There is a clarifying simplicity to the way this film goes about its business. The genre elements are mainly an armature on which to hang characters. I like to think that Howard Hawks would have appreciated this film, given that it's about a group of people who forge a community in order to deal with a threat. It's not lost on me that Tremors goes out of its way to emphasize work. Val and Earl are first and foremost workers. The audience knows what they do and gets to watch them do it before they're thrown into the deep end. Same with Rhonda, the film's token scientist/love interest. Most of the adult characters have a profession that the film tells you about, and that's a sneaky way of giving those characters lives that seem like they extend off the screen. Rhonda is a typical Howard Hawks heroine, too, who is smarter than the boys, but not by too much. The desert landscapes evoke westerns, too, and the variety of characters here would not be out of place in a version of Stagecoach or My Darling Clementine, assuming those films had room for giant man-eating worms. One of the last shots of Kevin Bacon as he defeats a graboid is even cribbed from that first shot of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach.
Kevin Bacon, famously, did not like this film at first. He thought it was career suicide at the time. He came around in the end, and cites it as one of the few films of his that he can actually watch. He claims to have seen it a dozen times at this point. The film also got director Ron Underwood his next job after Rob Reiner loved the film and suggested him for the chair on City Slickers. Underwood originally wanted Jack Palance for Earl, so things eventually came full circle. It's hard to imagine Reba McIntire's sitcom happening without this film as a calling card. The film didn't make much money when it was in theaters, but it was one of those films that in a bygone age found its audience on home video. It's a film that can ease a reluctant viewer into the horror movie without too much discomfort. I don't know that I'd call this a "cozy" horror movie, but it is certainly a comfort movie. It's the sort of film ideal for October sleepovers where a stack of videos carries the viewers into an autumn evening of fun horror movies. And it has a hook like the catchiest pop songs. Once you're on the line, it'll drag you to the end. That's no small feat.
Welcome once again to the October Horror Movie Challenge. This year's challenge is once again linked to my friend Dr. AC's annual Scare-a-thon. This year's beneficiary is International Rescue Committee, which helps mitigate humanitarian crises all over the world. The crisis in Gaza is currently foremost in their efforts. Donations at the link.
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