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Tremors (1990)

Director - Ron Underwood, Cinematography - Alexander Gruszynski

"Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't ya you bastard!"

Unlike Jose Ferrer and Mel Ferrer, Audrey Meadows and Jayne Meadows were related — Audrey, best known for her role as Alice Kramden on The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955-’56), was Jayne’s younger sister.

Both made appearances on network series in the ’70s and ’80s, including guest-star-filled shows like The Love Boat and Hotel, but Jayne Meadows was also a regular on the short-lived sitcom It’s Not Easy, which ABC canceled after five episodes in the fall of ’83. The series centered on divorced parents, Jack (Ken Howard) and Sharon (Carlene Watkins), who live across the street from each other in order to easily share custody of their two children. The kids reside with Jack and his mother, played by Meadows, while Sharon lives with her new husband, Neal (Bert Convy), and his son from his previous marriage.

Two Marriages debuted on ABC as a summer series a month prior to It’s Not Easy, but the trials and tribulations of its neighboring families — one nuclear (Michael Murphy and Janet Eilber played the parents), one blended (led by Tom Mason and Karen Carlson) — weren’t accompanied by a laugh track. After ten episodes it too was canceled, although teen heartthrob C. Thomas Howell and teen heartthrob in training Kirk Cameron wouldn’t be collecting unemployment checks for long.

One month after Two Marriages aired its final episode, ABC decided to give its “two neighboring families intertwine comedically and/or dramatically” concept one more try with the TV movie Love Thy Neighbor. Turner Classic Movies’s website explains the setup like this: “A serio-comedy casting John Ritter and Penny Marshall as next door suburbanites who overcome their mutual dislike for one another and are drawn into an unlikely affair when his wife runs off with her husband, leaving them to cope with their children and their houses.”

Tremors (1990)

The Hollywood monster movie exploded onto the scene in the 1950s. And no, this is not referring to the likes of Universal Studios’ Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man. Those 1950s creature features, often taking themselves far too seriously or hobbled by paltry budgets, included giant insects, monstrosities from the deep, or deadly lifeforms from outer space. Ron Underwood’s giant worm movie Tremors (itself a Universal production) attempts to balance that monster movie suspense with an unexpected dose of comedy – largely succeeding in the process compared to its contemporaries and predecessors. The 1980s, perhaps influenced by the newfound popularity of slasher horror (in particular the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises), had emphasized boundary-pushing gore and body horror over everything else in remakes like The Blob (1988) and The Fly (1986). Tremors knows better than to fall into that trap.

In the remote fictional town of Perfection, Nevada, Valentine “Val” McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Basset (Fred Ward) are two bored repairmen looking to relieve themselves of their podunk hometown. The population is just over a dozen, a single general store is the source of nightly excitement, and there is only one road leading out of the arid valley where Perfection lies. As Val and Earl drive themselves towards the mouth of the valley, they encounter the aftermath of two unexplained incidents: the dehydrated corpse of a Perfection resident stuck up an electrical tower and the bloodied scene of sheep and a severed shepherd’s head nearby. Val and Earl believe a serial killer is on the loose, returning to Perfection to warn the residents of what they have seen. But of course, the deaths aren’t the result of humans, but a gargantuan, fast-digging worm – briefly called a “Graboid” in this film (this term would be more widely used in the sequels).

Also appearing in the ensemble cast are Finn Carter, Michael Gross, Reba McEntire, Bobby Jacoby, Charlotte Stewart, Tony Genaro, Ariana Richards, Richard Marcus, and Victor Wong. 

Carter, as a seismologist graduate student from the Midwest named Rhonda LeBeck, is Val’s romantic interest. There are no subtleties about the future direction of Val and Rhonda’s relationship, but at least Tremors avoids making Carter’s character an uninteresting, naive scientist figure often stumbling into massive trouble. Val and Earl are just as prone to finding themselves in sticky situations as Rhonda is, and they all come to each other’s rescue more than once over the course of the film. Nevertheless, the whole Val-Rhonda romantic wink-and-nudge-fest is unnecessary, and adds nothing to the already-considerable life-and-death stakes of Tremors. Elsewhere, Gross and McEntire – the latter best known for her country music career and her 2000s television sitcom – are probably the most surprising, but their scenes should be watched (especially the moment when their arsenal is revealed, perhaps satirizing Americans’ fascination for firearms), not described.

Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson are co-producers and screenwriters for Tremors, and the dialogue these two have crafted is too ridiculous to take without cracking a clever smile. Any suspense within Tremors comes from the filmmaking, not the screenplay. But when paired with Kevin Bacon’s laughable accent paired alongside that unkempt mullet and Fred Ward as a sort of straight-shooting foil, the writing – often mindless, and too closely following a format of character inspections, blood and gore often paired with futile screaming, and jokes (until the final half-hour, the comic relief after-scenes are usually not close to where the violence was) to soften what has just happened – somehow worked for me. Whether it was Gross and McEntire’s characters talking about their elephant gun in the middle of combat or Victor Wong’s character maintaining a capitalist’s composure as he uses one part of the Graboid as an opportunity for a posing for photographs scheme, a near-perfect balance of gravity and wackiness is apparent even in the opening minutes.

A good amount of half-swears is indicative of some self-awareness within the film. Tremors, misunderstood by some moviegoers and critics taking too seriously a film that never takes itself seriously, reminds me of Starship Troopers (1997) – a distant cousin also about exterminating deep-dwelling monsters with survivalist instincts. Then-contemporary audiences and critics failed to understand the comedic placement in both movies, that any of the cheesiness found in both films were intentional. Tremors and Starship Troopers are neither show-us-the-monster/s-already or let’s-show-everything-right-away films. Both time their first significant monster reveals quite well. The former, to ratchet the tension early on, depends on low-angled, hand-held camera movements mimicking the Graboid’s progress towards its target. This approach, direct from Steven Spielberg’s tactics for Jaws (1975), was adopted thanks to the barebones budget for the film, passé as these techniques are now.

When the Graboid rears its head for the first time, the viewer can instantly tell that it is not the work of computerized animation, nor are the Graboids from the school of stop-motion animation innovated by Ray Harryhausen. But the Graboids found in Tremors are related to Harryhausen’s work, as all of them are enormous puppets. The filmmakers might have battled with a constraining budget, but the special effects here are believable, and outdo numerous other monster movies in the 1980s and 90s.

Special effects artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr., in their concept art, used elements of crocodiles, dinosaurs, elephants, rhinos, and other animals into their sketches – to have simply looked at worms would have been limiting in attempting to create a unique design. Hand puppets were used for the Graboid’s tentacle-like lingual appendages. With multi-pronged tongues resembling snakes, these giant, phallic worms, resemble somewhat the sandworms in David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The making of the Graboids for the original Tremors – there have been four sequels (all of which have been direct-to-video), with Tremors 6 (2018) currently filming – can be seen here. Some stills about the only full-size Graboid model (if we are talking cross-fictional-universe dimensions, a Graboid is larger than a Sarlacc’s head, but smaller than a Arrakis sandworm) can be seen here.

Though the fictional town of Perfection is in Nevada, Tremors was shot in Lone Pine and Olancha, California – two eastern Californian cities in Inyo County that convincingly double for Nevada (Inyo County borders Nevada; the filmmakers can thank California for being such a geologically diverse state). With so few interior shots in Tremors, the high desert frontier captured by the cameras has been rarely seen in American filmmaking. That on-location shooting allowed Perfection to feel as isolated as Val and Earl bemoan it for, offering to viewers a glimpse at the edge of the old Western frontier. Ron Underwood and cinematographer Alexander Gruszynski might not be John Ford and Winton C. Hoch (that director/cinematographer team’s credits include 1948′s 3 Godfathers, 1949′s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and 1956′s The Searchers), but the two make satisfactory use of the natural surroundings.

Tremors may not have found success in cinemas, but the majority of its sizeable viewership in home video releases and reruns on cable television assured it of future success. It is a monster film rough around its edges, something one might expect from a B-movie. But the humans, when not confronted with the absurdity of a burrowing worm, are believable terrorizing their town, are as believable as they can in such a situation; when that believability can’t be reconciled with events on-screen, Tremors tosses some comedy about for variety. No matter its unoriginality, there is a spirit to Tremors not easily replicated – a spirit that has a wicked sense of fun.

My rating: 7/10