It really grabs you
A review requested by John, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
The 1990 comedy-thriller monster horror film Tremors is so, so much better than you'd ever expect it to be, just based on reading up on it. The 1990s were, in retrospect, a halcyon period for whatever we want to call the genre of "popcorn adventure movie that's sort of horror but not really and involves a very large killer animal that is, objectively speaking, a giant monster, but you wouldn't feel comfortable calling it a Giant Monster", and Tremors is one of the unequivocal highlights of that cycle, in addition to being one of the very earliest exemplars of it. Indeed, I almost invariably fall into the habit of thinking that the whole matter of big killer beasties that have like as not been brought to life with some pretty fancy animatronics in that decade is basically a response to the extraordinarily big hit Jurassic Park in 1993, but of course Tremors beat it by three and a half years, and I don't think there's any way you can talk about the genre in that decade without bringing Tremors into it. Hell, for all I know it was the massive success of Tremors on home video (it was considered a disappointment during its theatrical release) that put Universal Pictures on the hunt for more movies just like it, and boom, there you go, Universal has a dinosaur picture. I'm not saying I think that happened. Just that Tremors is good enough that it passes the smell test.
So anyway, the point is that if all you know is "rednecks versus giant worms in the Nevada desert, featuring a cast whose second best-known name is a country singer making her acting debut", I'm sure you would never expect Tremors to be a good, frankly pretty great example of whatever the hell it is. And because of this, it probably shouldn't have surprised me nearly as much as it did that its delayed sequel, 1996's Tremors II: Aftershocks is also quite good - not as good as the first one, though a lot more of that comes down to budget than to any other specific reason that I can confidently point to. Because Tremors II: Aftershocks was bumped down to direct-to-video status, with its budget reduced from $17 million to $4 million, after the two biggest names from the first movie proved unavailable to return. And I am in part referring to basically every word in that sentence when I say that I had very low expectations for this film going into it. "Direct-to-video" isn't a death sentence for a film's prospective quality, but I think we can be forgiven for applying the rule of thumb that it is much likelier to mean bad things than good things. As far as the cast go, the lead actor of Aftershocks and one of only two people to come back from the first movie is Fred Ward, and I want to make it absolutely crystal-clear that I have nothing but love in my heart for the late Fred Ward. I have never once watched any film and thought at the end of it "that would have been better if only Fred Ward hadn't been in it". But also I don't think any movie should have to rely on Fred Ward to be its "big name".
The thing is, Tremors II: Aftershocks has something more important than a feature film budget or the burning white stardom of Kevin Bacon and Reba McEntire: it was made by people who really wanted to make it. Most notably, the screenwriters for this film were the same as the screenwriters for the first film, Brent Maddock & S.S. Wilson, and as near as I can tell, they were the ones who approached Universal rather than the other way around. Also, and this is the real tell, Wilson directed the film himself, allegedly not out of any desire to move up to the big seat (though he did serve as second unit director on the first movie), but simply so he could volunteer to do the job for almost no pay, to save money. And he was not the only crewmember who took a pay cut basically for the sheer pleasure of being in the Tremors II business. You can't buy that kind of enthusiasm. I mean, you literally cannot.
So now that we know what kind of scrappy little passion project we're talking about, what actually is this movie? "More of the same", sort of, though it does it well: good genre sequels often have to walk a narrow path of bringing back the stuff that made people like the first movie while expanding on it in enough ways that nobody would ever find themselves grousing "well, why am I not just watching the first one again?" and Aftershocks nails that balance. In what appears to be roughly the same six years after the events of the first movie that the film was actually released, we find that Earl Bassett (Ward), one of the heroic survivors of an encounter with large subterranean carnivorous worms, has largely blown through whatever fame and fortune had accrued to him as a result of those events; his former partner and fellow survivor Val McKee was much more judicious with his plans and has since left for a better life, leaving Earl stranded in the desert with an ostrich ranch that has proven to be a complete boondoggle. He's in absolutely no position to say no when a fabulously wealthy Mexican oilman, Carlos Ortega (Marcelo Tubert) comes out to find him in his dusty purgatory with a ridiculously generous offer: Ortega's oil field has been infested by those same maneating creatures, and he's offering $50,000 per dead creature - "Graboid", to use the word that the first film was content to use with much more restraint than this one does, in one of the clearest places that Maddock & Wilson's fannish love for their own creation overwhelms their wisdom as screenwriters, maybe. Anyway, Earl wants money more than he values his safety, so he heads down to Chiapas with the obnoxiously eager Grady Hoover (Chris Gartin), who has become a bit of a fanboy himself, having hungrily learned all there is to learn about Graboids and Earl himself, and the two of them go worm-hunting.
So far, so "get the guy back where he was in the last movie", with a healthy assist from Jurassic Park's own first act. The difference is all in the texture and around the margins. For one thing, Tremors II: Aftershocks takes place in a world where Tremors has already taken place, which should go without saying, but when you start to think about it, a lot of sequels can't manage it. This manifests in things as small as the wry running gag about the Graboid arcade game that everybody assumes has proven to be a cash cow for Earl, in charmingly stubborn ignorance of the economics of the arcade game industry, particularly in the early 1990s; it also finds the smoothest way possible to explain where Bacon and McEntire's characters are without stopping the movie cold to do so. But also the entire character of Grady exists primarily to redirect the energies of the story away from where they were in the original: he's one of the fans who made Tremors a cult hit manifested into the Tremors universe, a character who by definition could not have existed in the first movie. And I say this even while feeling like Grady is a pretty scrawny example of comic relief writing, performed by Gartin as far more annoying than charming, and I don't at all think that was the intent. But still, credit is due to the character for creating a brand new dynamic that prevents this from ever being just a retread of the original, while also giving Ward an entirely new set of interactions to play against.
The other important choice the writers have made is also one that sequels sometimes have a problem with: they don't ask us to be stupid and pretend that we don't know what movie we're watching. There's very little about the first act of Aftershocks that could reasonably be described as a "thriller"; the characters remember from the first movie how to kill these things, so the first 30-ish minutes are basically just a comic romp, with Wilson demonstrating a nimble skill for deadpan violent humor presented with a pleasant, almost sweet attitude. A substantial portion of this stretch of the film is structured almost like an animated cartoon, a bunch of one-off gags separated by dissolves, and while I don't think anybody could argue that this was the laugh riot of 1996, there's a pretty consistent brightness and merriment on display, nicely flavored by the occasional gore effects and large-scale creature effects. At one point these things happen literally simultaneously, as Ward daintily opens a children's parasol, without moving his face an inch, to protect himself from a rainfall of blood and guts.
It's breezy fun enough to be worthwhile on its own, but also it's basically a trick the film is playing on us; because it does plan to be a thriller very much like the first movie, and this happens somewhere between the one-third and one-half mark, when it does the thing monster movies do, and reveals that actually... And despite the fact that the "actually" has been public knowledge for almost three decades, I still don't want to spoil Tremors II: Aftershocks if I don't have to. Suffice it to say that the script is genuinely clever in spending its last ~40 minutes re-running the first Tremors but also inverting it by completely reversing the skill set needed to fight the creatures. It's the best kind of "more of the same" - more of the same, but also completely different and unpredictable. And it gets some new creature designs in there, ones that objectively should make it feel like the film is shrinking its scope but instead make it feel instead like it's broadening its reference pool to be more than just "Jaws in the dirt". Jurassic Park is obviously a touchstone; so, in a couple of scenes, is The Thing. And so is Tremors itself, with the film pointedly populating itself wither with characters who wouldn't have fit in its predecessor (besides Grady, there's a scientist played by Helen Shaver who contrasts with the uneducated blue-collar vibe of the rest of the setting), or bringing back Michael Gross's deranged gun nut in a very different mode than we saw him last.
Basically this is all a whole lot more thoughtful than it had the slightest reason to be. This isn't the same as saying it's "smart", something that would frankly be of very little use to it; but it understands the reasons why people want to watch silly-sincere movies about snazzy looking monsters eating people and getting blown up, and it wants to provide a good version of that experience. The acting, sadly, isn't really there other than Ward; the effects are straining as hard as they can against the budget (it even has some pretty good-for-1996 CGI), but they do hit the limits of that budget eventually; the music definitely has an unmistakable "direct-to-video" chintziness about it. But it's fun, and it's doing everything in its power to be creative in remixing the setpieces from the first movie, but building them around body temperature instead of movement vibrations. The first Tremors is secretly one of the masterpieces of its genre; the second one has to settle for being merely an above-average example of that genre. But the average, circa 1996, was high enough that this still means something special.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
The 1990 comedy-thriller monster horror film Tremors is so, so much better than you'd ever expect it to be, just based on reading up on it. The 1990s were, in retrospect, a halcyon period for whatever we want to call the genre of "popcorn adventure movie that's sort of horror but not really and involves a very large killer animal that is, objectively speaking, a giant monster, but you wouldn't feel comfortable calling it a Giant Monster", and Tremors is one of the unequivocal highlights of that cycle, in addition to being one of the very earliest exemplars of it. Indeed, I almost invariably fall into the habit of thinking that the whole matter of big killer beasties that have like as not been brought to life with some pretty fancy animatronics in that decade is basically a response to the extraordinarily big hit Jurassic Park in 1993, but of course Tremors beat it by three and a half years, and I don't think there's any way you can talk about the genre in that decade without bringing Tremors into it. Hell, for all I know it was the massive success of Tremors on home video (it was considered a disappointment during its theatrical release) that put Universal Pictures on the hunt for more movies just like it, and boom, there you go, Universal has a dinosaur picture. I'm not saying I think that happened. Just that Tremors is good enough that it passes the smell test.
So anyway, the point is that if all you know is "rednecks versus giant worms in the Nevada desert, featuring a cast whose second best-known name is a country singer making her acting debut", I'm sure you would never expect Tremors to be a good, frankly pretty great example of whatever the hell it is. And because of this, it probably shouldn't have surprised me nearly as much as it did that its delayed sequel, 1996's Tremors II: Aftershocks is also quite good - not as good as the first one, though a lot more of that comes down to budget than to any other specific reason that I can confidently point to. Because Tremors II: Aftershocks was bumped down to direct-to-video status, with its budget reduced from $17 million to $4 million, after the two biggest names from the first movie proved unavailable to return. And I am in part referring to basically every word in that sentence when I say that I had very low expectations for this film going into it. "Direct-to-video" isn't a death sentence for a film's prospective quality, but I think we can be forgiven for applying the rule of thumb that it is much likelier to mean bad things than good things. As far as the cast go, the lead actor of Aftershocks and one of only two people to come back from the first movie is Fred Ward, and I want to make it absolutely crystal-clear that I have nothing but love in my heart for the late Fred Ward. I have never once watched any film and thought at the end of it "that would have been better if only Fred Ward hadn't been in it". But also I don't think any movie should have to rely on Fred Ward to be its "big name".
The thing is, Tremors II: Aftershocks has something more important than a feature film budget or the burning white stardom of Kevin Bacon and Reba McEntire: it was made by people who really wanted to make it. Most notably, the screenwriters for this film were the same as the screenwriters for the first film, Brent Maddock & S.S. Wilson, and as near as I can tell, they were the ones who approached Universal rather than the other way around. Also, and this is the real tell, Wilson directed the film himself, allegedly not out of any desire to move up to the big seat (though he did serve as second unit director on the first movie), but simply so he could volunteer to do the job for almost no pay, to save money. And he was not the only crewmember who took a pay cut basically for the sheer pleasure of being in the Tremors II business. You can't buy that kind of enthusiasm. I mean, you literally cannot.
So now that we know what kind of scrappy little passion project we're talking about, what actually is this movie? "More of the same", sort of, though it does it well: good genre sequels often have to walk a narrow path of bringing back the stuff that made people like the first movie while expanding on it in enough ways that nobody would ever find themselves grousing "well, why am I not just watching the first one again?" and Aftershocks nails that balance. In what appears to be roughly the same six years after the events of the first movie that the film was actually released, we find that Earl Bassett (Ward), one of the heroic survivors of an encounter with large subterranean carnivorous worms, has largely blown through whatever fame and fortune had accrued to him as a result of those events; his former partner and fellow survivor Val McKee was much more judicious with his plans and has since left for a better life, leaving Earl stranded in the desert with an ostrich ranch that has proven to be a complete boondoggle. He's in absolutely no position to say no when a fabulously wealthy Mexican oilman, Carlos Ortega (Marcelo Tubert) comes out to find him in his dusty purgatory with a ridiculously generous offer: Ortega's oil field has been infested by those same maneating creatures, and he's offering $50,000 per dead creature - "Graboid", to use the word that the first film was content to use with much more restraint than this one does, in one of the clearest places that Maddock & Wilson's fannish love for their own creation overwhelms their wisdom as screenwriters, maybe. Anyway, Earl wants money more than he values his safety, so he heads down to Chiapas with the obnoxiously eager Grady Hoover (Chris Gartin), who has become a bit of a fanboy himself, having hungrily learned all there is to learn about Graboids and Earl himself, and the two of them go worm-hunting.
So far, so "get the guy back where he was in the last movie", with a healthy assist from Jurassic Park's own first act. The difference is all in the texture and around the margins. For one thing, Tremors II: Aftershocks takes place in a world where Tremors has already taken place, which should go without saying, but when you start to think about it, a lot of sequels can't manage it. This manifests in things as small as the wry running gag about the Graboid arcade game that everybody assumes has proven to be a cash cow for Earl, in charmingly stubborn ignorance of the economics of the arcade game industry, particularly in the early 1990s; it also finds the smoothest way possible to explain where Bacon and McEntire's characters are without stopping the movie cold to do so. But also the entire character of Grady exists primarily to redirect the energies of the story away from where they were in the original: he's one of the fans who made Tremors a cult hit manifested into the Tremors universe, a character who by definition could not have existed in the first movie. And I say this even while feeling like Grady is a pretty scrawny example of comic relief writing, performed by Gartin as far more annoying than charming, and I don't at all think that was the intent. But still, credit is due to the character for creating a brand new dynamic that prevents this from ever being just a retread of the original, while also giving Ward an entirely new set of interactions to play against.
The other important choice the writers have made is also one that sequels sometimes have a problem with: they don't ask us to be stupid and pretend that we don't know what movie we're watching. There's very little about the first act of Aftershocks that could reasonably be described as a "thriller"; the characters remember from the first movie how to kill these things, so the first 30-ish minutes are basically just a comic romp, with Wilson demonstrating a nimble skill for deadpan violent humor presented with a pleasant, almost sweet attitude. A substantial portion of this stretch of the film is structured almost like an animated cartoon, a bunch of one-off gags separated by dissolves, and while I don't think anybody could argue that this was the laugh riot of 1996, there's a pretty consistent brightness and merriment on display, nicely flavored by the occasional gore effects and large-scale creature effects. At one point these things happen literally simultaneously, as Ward daintily opens a children's parasol, without moving his face an inch, to protect himself from a rainfall of blood and guts.
It's breezy fun enough to be worthwhile on its own, but also it's basically a trick the film is playing on us; because it does plan to be a thriller very much like the first movie, and this happens somewhere between the one-third and one-half mark, when it does the thing monster movies do, and reveals that actually... And despite the fact that the "actually" has been public knowledge for almost three decades, I still don't want to spoil Tremors II: Aftershocks if I don't have to. Suffice it to say that the script is genuinely clever in spending its last ~40 minutes re-running the first Tremors but also inverting it by completely reversing the skill set needed to fight the creatures. It's the best kind of "more of the same" - more of the same, but also completely different and unpredictable. And it gets some new creature designs in there, ones that objectively should make it feel like the film is shrinking its scope but instead make it feel instead like it's broadening its reference pool to be more than just "Jaws in the dirt". Jurassic Park is obviously a touchstone; so, in a couple of scenes, is The Thing. And so is Tremors itself, with the film pointedly populating itself wither with characters who wouldn't have fit in its predecessor (besides Grady, there's a scientist played by Helen Shaver who contrasts with the uneducated blue-collar vibe of the rest of the setting), or bringing back Michael Gross's deranged gun nut in a very different mode than we saw him last.
Basically this is all a whole lot more thoughtful than it had the slightest reason to be. This isn't the same as saying it's "smart", something that would frankly be of very little use to it; but it understands the reasons why people want to watch silly-sincere movies about snazzy looking monsters eating people and getting blown up, and it wants to provide a good version of that experience. The acting, sadly, isn't really there other than Ward; the effects are straining as hard as they can against the budget (it even has some pretty good-for-1996 CGI), but they do hit the limits of that budget eventually; the music definitely has an unmistakable "direct-to-video" chintziness about it. But it's fun, and it's doing everything in its power to be creative in remixing the setpieces from the first movie, but building them around body temperature instead of movement vibrations. The first Tremors is secretly one of the masterpieces of its genre; the second one has to settle for being merely an above-average example of that genre. But the average, circa 1996, was high enough that this still means something special.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Categories: comedies, here be monsters, horror, thrillers, worthy sequels
