Tremors

Tremors (1990)
No Frills Productions / Pacific Western Productions / Universal Pictures
Director: Ron Underwood

Meanwhile, in America...

Earl Bassett and Valentine “Val” McKee are itinerant workers, trading under “V + E Odd Jobs”, living hand to mouth in a remote part of Nevada. They’ve settled into a routine of assignments in and around the small town of Perfection (“Est. 1902, Pop. 14”). In the nearby desert, graduate student Rhonda LeBeck is conducting a seismological survey. (Although oddly, her seismographs are stamped with “Property of M.S.U.” which would seem to suggest the university of a state beginning with “M”. The nearest, Montana, is two states north, and all the other candidates are over in the eastern half of the country.) Having heard about her arrival, Val is keen to meet her but disappointed to discover that she isn’t his physical type. Rhonda asks Val and Earl to check whether there’s been any drilling or other activity in the area as her seismographs are showing some unusual readings that don’t match the records of previous years.

Hoping to escape to bigger and better things, the pair pack up their belongings and drive off to Bixby, a larger town in the next valley over. They don’t get very far, though, before they spot an elderly resident of Perfection, Edgar Deems, clinging to the upper part of an electricity pylon and holding a rifle. He proves to be dead; they take his body back to Perfection, where the town doctor determines the cause of death to be dehydration, suggesting Edgar had climbed the pylon and then just sat there for two or more days. On their second attempt to leave, Val and Earl drive past the farmstead of Old Fred, whose sheep have all been mutilated. Fred himself has been pulled into the ground and killed. They return once more to Perfection and try to call the police from the phone in Walter Chang’s general store, but the line is dead. Another attack, this time on two road workers, has cut the line and caused a rockslide across the only road out of the valley. When Val and Earl discover this on their final drive out, they nearly end up stranded because of what seems to be a mechanical problem with their truck. As they find when they park up again outside Chang’s store, something resembling a large snake has coiled around the truck’s rear axle and was evidently trying to hold their truck back at the site of the slide. It's dead, having been torn away from the rest of some larger creature. Chang buys this remarkable specimen from the boys and is soon charging his neighbours to have their photo taken with it.

Burt and Heather Gummer, a local survivalist couple, try to organise the rest of the town into responding to the crisis. All are agreed that getting help from Bixby is a priority, and Chang provides a couple of horses so that Val and Earl can ride over. On the way, they pass the doctor’s place and are led, by the sound of the radio, to find his car buried end up beneath the ground. As they continue on, they themselves are attacked by the culprit. It’s a creature that resembles a bloated, spiny worm, perhaps as much as ten metres in length, with a large beak-like mouth that hinges open to reveal several prehensile tongues, each with its own snapping maw. The thing that wrapped itself around their rear axle earlier was just one of these tongues. The horses are killed, but Val and Earl are able to outrun the creature as far as an aqueduct, where it runs head first into the interior side of a concrete wall and dies. Rhonda, who has been working on the far side of the aqueduct, helps the boys to excavate the creature. Together they hypothesise that, having no eyes, it hunts by tracking vibrations and uses its spines to push itself at high speed through the ground. Rhonda’s seismograph readings suggest that there are three more in the vicinity. As they all head for her truck, they’re attacked by another of the creatures and take refuge on a large boulder, which the creature is unable to burrow through, climb up or overturn. They wait overnight for it to leave, but it proves extremely patient. They eventually escape by using some nearby construction debris to pole-vault from boulder to boulder and onto Rhonda’s truck.

By plotting the sites of the attacks so far on a map of the valley, Val determines that the monsters are heading towards the town. Chang – who insists that as the first people to encounter the creatures, they have the right to name them – dubs them “Graboids”. The Graboids converge on the store, killing Chang and forcing the others to climb up onto the roof. Burt and Heather have gone to their home to arm themselves and, not having yet been told that the creatures hunt by vibration, switch on an ammunition cartridge cleaning machine that attracts one of the Graboids. It bursts through the wall of their basement rec room, but with dozens of firearms readily to hand including an elephant gun, the Gummers are able to hold the Graboid at bay and eventually kill it. The other two Graboids, meanwhile, begin to undermine the foundations of the town’s buildings and drag down another resident. Unable to stay put, the survivors manage to get onto a tracked digger and trailer and head for the mountains, picking up the Gummers on the way. Before they can get to the mountains, however, the digger falls into a pit trap dug by the Graboids, which have raced ahead and lain in wait. The party scare the creatures off briefly with one of several pipe bombs the Gummers have prepared and run for the nearest pile of boulders.

Penned in by the remaining two creatures, the survivors devise a plan to “fish” for them by pelting the ground with small stones then throwing a pipe bomb at them. One Graboid falls for the trick, swallows the bomb and is killed. The other spits the bomb back at the boulders, driving the survivors to take cover and leaving Val, Earl and Rhonda at risk on the soil. Finding himself holding a pipe bomb, Val runs for a nearby cliff edge with Earl and Rhonda in pursuit. The last Graboid gives chase. With the bomb’s fuse lit, Val throws it just past the approaching Graboid, and the blast drives it straight past the fugitives and through the side of the cliff to its death on the ground below.

Later, Val and Earl again discuss their plan to relocate to Bixby, while Rhonda prepares for some high-profile research into the Graboids. Val is too awkward to declare his feelings for Rhonda, but with a little persuasion from Earl, he kisses her.

Tremors arrives too late to ride the coattails of the remake of King Kong (1976) or Jaws (1975), which it more closely resembles, and ahead of Jurassic Park (1993) and the late 1990s / early 2000s wave of smart-alecky CGI-enabled monster movies that will follow after. Tonally, it feels separate from all of these – it’s less cynical, less knowing and winking, more innocent. Nice, even. It’s an unassuming love letter to the American creature features of the 50s, with the added polish of some outstanding practical special effects and a healthy dash of modernity.

In plot terms, that modernity can be seen in the refusal to give the viewer pat explanations for where the Graboids come from. We know from a map glimpsed halfway through the movie that the little town of Perfection is in Nevada, but no mention is made of the Nevada Test Site, America’s most thoroughly used domestic nuclear testing ground, or the famous Area 51 USAF facility, beloved of UFO fanatics, both of which are located further south near Las Vegas. Are the Graboids the product of radioactive mutation? Some kind of escaped government experiment? An alien life form? A 50s monster movie would undoubtedly give us one of these answers. Here, the characters moot all of these possibilities but, in the absence of any clues, they don’t arrive at a conclusion. And honestly, it makes no difference to them where the creatures have come from – their only interest in the matter is not being killed by them. This gives the otherwise unreal proceedings a veneer of realism.

Having a monstrous threat lurking literally beneath the surface of rural America looks absolutely like an invitation to look for deeper meanings. (Granted – and I don’t think it’s unfair of me to say this – self-awareness isn’t exactly Hollywood’s forte.) But do the Graboids symbolise anything? I honestly can’t see it. Is it small-town racism? And yet the two BIPOC characters are accepted without question or comment by the other characters. Miguel admittedly doesn’t get much to say or do and feels like a passenger for most of the movie. Walter Chang has a far more substantial part, and although he doesn’t make it all the way through the movie, he certainly gets the best death scene (and the actor certainly makes the most of it). His presence is a straightforward reflection of the influx of Chinese mine workers into Nevada in the 19th century. Well then: do the Graboids symbolise small-town conservatism more generally? And yet historically Nevada’s political representation, in state and federally, has been quite balanced between Republicans and Democrats, and socially it’s among the more liberal American states. I’d be hard pressed to argue that the Graboids symbolise any particular aspect or conflict in any of the lead characters’ psyches. I think I’d have to conclude that it really is just the writers having a bit of fun with the idea of sharks in the desert – a grown-up, open-air game of “the floor is lava”.

(Of course, it’s just possible Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965) was an influence – giant, burrowing, worm-like creatures that hunt by following vibrations. The way the Graboids’ jaws hinge open hints more at the 1984 film adaptation than at the novel itself.)

The modernity in the lead characters is, I think, obvious. Female scientists appear fairly regularly in 50s creature features, but as assistants to male scientists (see, for example, It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) or Tarantula (1955)) or their daughters (as in Them! (1954)), and they typically end up merely providing a love interest for the butch, uniformed hero. Rhonda is allowed to take centre stage in Tremors as the only scientist in the movie – the other characters can’t help but look to her for answers. She defies the young horndog Val’s expectations by being a capable woman and not sexualised eye candy, although granted she does end up in a clinch with him. (According to bonus material on the Blu ray release, this moment was added to the end of the movie in response to the test audience’s feedback. The original script ended on another realist, but dissatisfying, note in having the pair awkwardly go their separate ways without expressing their feelings for each other.) Val and Earl, meanwhile, far from being bullish authority figures, are humble itinerant handymen, simple working-class men. And they’re scripted with delightful maturity – Val gives frequent flashes of vulnerability underneath the bluster, and Earl, behind his gruffness and his “pardon my French” old-fashionedness, shows clear affection and admiration for the youngsters he keeps company with.

Among the lead cast, surely the most recognisable is Kevin Bacon, of the proverbial six degrees of separation. He’d been acting in films for over a decade, with his big break as a leading actor coming in dance movie Footloose (1984). He came to Tremors off the back of parenthood comedy She’s Having a Baby (1988) and Hollywood satire The Big Picture (1989) and would shortly afterwards appear in the “Brat Pack” horror fantasy Flatliners (1990). Bacon’s career has been a succession of reinventions and comebacks, and his casting as Val in this comedy-horror movie looks like quite a smooth transition between the genres of his preceding and successive roles. Fred Ward, playing Earl, was two decades into a steady film career that has consisted mostly of smaller character parts. Rhonda was Finn Carter’s second cinematic role and, judging from her IMDb listing, quite likely her best; she’s had a much more successful career in television. Oddly, probably the biggest household name in America at the time Tremors was released would have been Michael Gross, cast as maniacal survivalist Burt Gummer after seven years playing the father in the smash hit sitcom Family Ties (1982-89). There are a couple of notable guest stars among the secondary characters: Victor Wong (Egg Shen in Big Trouble in Little China (1986)) as storekeeper Walter Chang and country singer Reba McEntire, in the first of what would become a string of occasional forays into acting, as Burt’s wife Heather.

Tremors wasn’t written specifically for 1990. Scriptwriters Brent Maddock and SS Wilson had had the idea knocking about for years; they started to get traction for it in the mid-80s, after the huge success of their film Short Circuit (1986), in which a military robot gains sentience, develops a cute personality and liberates itself from its creators. But 1990 feels like the right time for Tremors just the same. The rise of the Solidarność workers’ resistance movement in Poland had triggered uprisings in countries across Eastern Europe in late 1989 that signalled the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall fell just weeks before the film was released in cinemas. American political economist Francis Fukuyama prematurely, and with absolutely staggering cultural narcissism, proclaimed “The End of History”. At any rate, people were talking about having “won” the Cold War and, for at least a year (with the first Gulf War breaking out in earnest in January 1991), the American populace had every reason to feel good about themselves and the world at large. The good humour, small-town folksiness and simple heroism of Tremors chime very nicely with this moment.

So it’s a shame the film didn’t perform better at the box office. The filmmakers have suggested that inadequate marketing was to blame. American cinemas had already seen Ghostbusters (1984) and Gremlins (1984), so it’s not like the distributors should have been confused by a film blending elements of light fantasy horror and comedy. And yet the trailer for Tremors is undeniably poor. (If Universal Pictures could only have compared notes with Columbia and Warner Bros...) Happily, the film found a cult following on home media, which led to a string of sequels that are apparently still going. Fred Ward came back for Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996) but left it at that; Michael Gross has appeared in every single one of them. I’d say Aftershocks is worth a look, but it’s already a case of diminishing returns, and good luck to you if you decide to try the later instalments of the franchise.