Tremors – Review

Once a staple of cable TV movie repeats, Tremors remains a funny adventure. Opening in rural Nevada with Valentine McKee, or Val (Bacon), taking an early morning pee, he then rudely awakens his buddy Earl Bassett (Ward), who is snoozing still in his truck bed. The men ready themselves for work, and smoke cigarettes. They argue over who made breakfast last. Was it baloney and beans, or eggs over easy?

As the handymen’s current job has them making barbed wire fences, they wonder if a better life awaits and they can land a real job. Earl chastises Val for never thinking ahead. Soon however none of this shit will matter.

They spy who is supposed to be a new seismologist girl, Rhonda (Carter), trudging around the plains. She has been getting some very strange readings and wonders if anyone around has been blowing anything up. The men deny knowing anything and take off.

They roll into the town of Perfection, population 14. Walter Chang’s Market is the place to be in the popping town. Melvin bounces a basketball off a wall outside. Inside, Walter (Wong) listens to Burt, “UZI 4 U” Gummer (Gross) ask for hollow points, and worry about the government coming into town via eminent domain. That seismologist may be there to start the proceedings! His wife Heather (McEntire) tries to calm his nerves.

However… as Rhonda calls it a day in the field she is nearly swooped up by the plot of the movie, which zooms into action and answers all the dangling questions about underground shaking. Tremors brings hungry worm monsters burrowing through the ground, and able to sense any motion on land. This sets off the cast into a town-wide game of the ground is lava.

Solid acting, a tight little script and a very fun execution makes Tremors an amusing adventure every time. The very simple idea behind the plot is a good one. It has some really silly moments and good lines, with a tease of danger and monstrous worms, of course. I liked it while young, and it still plays pretty well today. While the idea and story classify it in the horror category, it’s not realllly that scary, and is mostly designed to be an entertaining time.

There are like 5+ sequels and a TV series or something I think, but I did not see any of them beyond part 2, and I don’t think any hit the theater. A TV movie in 2018 brought back much of the original cast, but the 'pilot' episode did not get picked up for a series.