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In the first Tremors film Kevin Bacon and Fred
Ward star as handymen Val McKee and Earl Bassett, who are
looking for work. When leaving the tiny Nevada Desert town
of Perfection they come across an attractive seismology student
who is taking some unusual readings. Before they know what
has happened they, and the handful of inhabitants of Perfection
- including the gun-toting survivalist Burt Gummer - are fighting
for their lives against huge underground man-eating worms
that move like lightening and are attracted to sound.
This
is one of my all-time favourite films. Fun is the key word
here. Bacon and Ward prove to be a great pairing. You can
tell they got on well together, and the humour of their partnership
and the very weird situation they find themselves in comes
across as well-balanced and quirky. I would recommend anyone
to give this one a try. It's like a modernised fifties B-movie
with all the enjoyable elements that brings. Extras on this
disc are a Making of Tremors featurette, Trailers,
Production Notes and Cast & Filmmakers' Biographies.
In Tremors 2: Aftershocks, Earl Bassett is asked by
the Mexican government to hunt Graboids (the worm creatures)
for $50,000 each. Having been cheated out of the money made
on his first venture by unscrupulous lawyers, he accepts,
calling in Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) for help. But they
discover the Graboids have a second part to their life-cycle
which involves three aboveground Shriekers tearing their way
out of each creature. To make matters worse the Shriekers
self-reproduce by eating.
So no Kevin Bacon for this one, who has gone on to other bigger
roles. But Fred Ward and Michael Gross return for a slightly
sillier but still watchable sequel. I think it was a mistake
to put a Kevin Bacon lookalike in his place, although he fills
the role adequately without bringing anything new. In fact,
many of the same set-pieces are played-out. Helen Shaver plays
a scientist to give Ward the love interest that Bacon had
in the first film. I did find myself warming to this film
after a slow start.
In Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, Burt Gummer kills
an army of Shriekers in Argentina and arrives back in Perfection
to find Jack giving guided tours to tourists, complete with
cheap and fake effects. All hell breaks loose when real shriekers
show up, and this time they have mutated into flying creatures.
And why is one albino Graboid following Burt around?
Michael Gross returns to give the only continuity for this
third outing. Once a few comments have been made about flying
Shriekers lighting their farts (internal gases are ignited
to enable them to takeoff and attack at great speed) you soon
realise the whole concept is starting to get more than a little
ridiculous. There are some nice moments, but even Burt Gummer
has become a parody of himself by now. Extras include a Spotlight
On Location, a Trailer, Production Notes
and Cast & Filmmakers' Biographies.
The fourth and last film is a prequel set in the late 1800s.
When a number of horrible unexplained deaths take place in
a silver mine in the town of Rejection (the original name
for Perfection), the mine is closed and people start to leave.
The owner, Hiram Gummer (great-grandfather of Burt - again
played by Michael Gross) arrives to get things moving, but
when he experiences one of the underground creatures firsthand
the frightened man hires a gunfighter to do his work for him...
With unexpected consequences.
It's
not giving away too much to voice the obvious and say that
the gunfighter meets a sticky end, and that Hiram becomes
a man and learns to fight his own battles - even becoming
a hero. Yawn. By now the format is tedious, and has pretty
much run out of ideas. Placing it in a different time period
hasn't helped reignite the fire the original had.
It makes sense in this time of DVD box sets to sell these
four films together. If a special edition of the original
Tremors had been released I would probably have scored
it much higher, but on average 7 is a fair compromise for
the set.
Ty
Power
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