Tremors (film)


Tremors is a 1990 American horror comedy film directed by Ron Underwood, produced by Gale Anne Hurd, Brent Maddock, and S. S. Wilson, and written by Maddock, Wilson, and Underwood. Tremors was released by Universal Pictures and stars Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter, Michael Gross, and Reba McEntire.
In the film, tired of their dull lives in the small desert town of Perfection, Nevada, repairmen Val McKee and Earl Bassett try to skip town. However, they happen upon a series of mysterious deaths and a concerned seismologist Rhonda studying unnatural readings below the ground. With the help of an eccentric survivalist couple Burt and Heather Gummer, the group fights for survival against giant, worm-like monsters hungry for human flesh.
The film is the first installment of the Tremors franchise, and was followed by five direct-to-video sequels: ', ', ', ' and ' and a direct-to-video prequel, '. A television series titled Tremors: The Series, aired from March through August 2003.

Plot

Valentine "Val" McKee and Earl Bassett are handymen working in Perfection, Nevada, an isolated settlement in the high desert east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. They eventually get tired of their jobs and leave for Bixby, the nearest town. As they leave, they discover the dead body of another resident, Edgar Deems, perched atop an electrical tower, still grasping the tower's crossbeams and his rifle. Jim Wallace, the town's doctor, determines that Edgar died of dehydration, apparently having been too afraid to climb down.
Later on, an unseen creature kills shepherd Fred and his flock of sheep. Val and Earl discover his severed head and believe that a serial killer is on the loose. Two construction workers ignore Val and Earl's warning and are killed by the same creature, causing a rock slide. Val and Earl try to find help after warning the residents, but find the phone lines are dead and that the rock slide has blocked the only road out of town. Out of sight, a snake-like creature wraps itself around their truck's rear axle, but is torn apart when Val stomps on the accelerator and drives away, and is discovered when they return to town.
Val and Earl borrow horses to ride to Bixby for help. They come upon Wallace and his wife's buried station wagon near their trailer, but the couple is missing. As they press on, an enormous burrowing worm-like monster suddenly erupts out of the ground, revealing the snake-like creature to be one of the worm's many tentacled "tongues". Thrown from their horses, the men flee with the monster in pursuit. The chase ends when the eyeless creature crashes through the concrete wall of an aqueduct, dying from the impact. Rhonda LeBeck, a graduate student conducting seismology tests in the area, stumbles onto the scene; she deduces from previous readings that three other worms are in the area. Rhonda, Val, and Earl become trapped overnight atop a cluster of boulders near one of the worms, and surmise that the creatures hunt their prey by detecting seismic vibrations. The trio then finds some discarded poles and use them to pole vault across some nearby boulders and eventually reach Rhonda's truck, narrowly escaping the creature.
After the three return to town, the worms attack and kill general store owner Walter Chang, forcing everyone to hide on the town's various rooftops. Meanwhile, survivalist couple Burt and Heather Gummer manage to kill one of the creatures after unwittingly luring it to their basement armory. In town, the two remaining worms attack the building foundations, knocking over a trailer belonging to Nestor before dragging him under and devouring him. Realizing they cannot stay in the town any longer, Earl, Rhonda, and Miguel distract the monsters while Val commandeers a track loader and chains a semi-trailer to the rear; the survivors use it to try to escape to a nearby mountain range. En route, both worms create a sinkhole trap that disables the track loader, and the survivors flee to some nearby boulders for safety. Earl then has an idea to lure in the worms and trick them into swallowing Burt's homemade pipe bombs. The strategy successfully kills one worm, but the last one spits a bomb back towards the survivors, forcing them to disperse as the explosion destroys all but one of the remaining bombs.
Val lures the final worm into chasing him to the edge of a cliff and then explodes the remaining bomb behind it, frightening the worm into charging through the cliff face, where it plummets to its death onto the rocks below. The group returns to town, where they call in the authorities to begin an investigation while Earl encourages Val to pursue a romantic relationship with Rhonda.

Cast

Production

The concept of Tremors was originally conceived in the early 1980s, when writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock were working for the United States Navy as filmmakers in charge of creating educational safety videos. While getting footage, the two climbed a large desert boulder and asked the question "what if there was something that wouldn't let us off of this rock?" causing the two to later come up with an idea dubbed 'Land Sharks'. They shared their idea to friend Ron Underwood, who was working with National Geographic as a documentary director, and used his knowledge of zoology to better develop the "land sharks" into creatures that could realistically exist.
After their script for Short Circuit became a major box office hit, Wilson and Maddock quickly began shopping around their idea for Tremors. The name 'Land Sharks' was changed due to a then-popular Saturday Night Live sketch featuring a character of the same name. The original screenplay, titled 'Beneath Perfection', was finished in June 1988.

Filming

Filming began in early 1989 over the course of 50 days. Principal photography took place around Lone Pine, California and the isolated community of Darwin, California, which the crew liked due to its uncanny similitaries to the fictional town of Perfection, Nevada. The town, which was entirely a set, was built near Olancha, California at. The mountains in the distance are the Sierra Nevada, and Owens Lake is visible in the background during the film's climax.

Props

The creature for Tremors was designed by Amalgamated Dynamics. The full-scale graboid seen after being dug up by Val was cast in lightweight foam. It was placed in a trench, then buried, and dug up again to achieve the desired "used" effect.
Burt's elephant gun, an 8-gauge Darne shotgun, was rented from a private collector for use in the film. It "fired" dummy cartridges custom made from solid brass rod stock.

Post-production

Composer Ernest Troost's musical score for the film went mostly unused. The studio thought it was "too goofy" and cut most of it, later hiring composer Robert Folk to write a new score that was more "serious and action-y". Despite his contributions, Folk ultimately went uncredited.
Tremors was set for a November 1989 release. However, the MPAA gave the film an R-rating due to language, and the creators decided at the last minute to make the film more commercially viable. Over 20 or so uses of the word "fuck" were either cut or redubbed with softer words; examples include "can you fly, you sucker?" and "we killed that motherhumper", among several others. The film was pushed back to allow more time for editing, and the film was eventually released in January 1990 with a PG-13 rating. Wilson and Maddock later stated they were happy with the decision to make Tremors appeal to a family audience.

Release and reception

Box office

Tremors opened on January 19, 1990 in 1,457 theaters against no new releases and debuted at the #5 spot, behind Born on the Fourth of July, Tango & Cash, The War Of The Roses, and Internal Affairs, grossing $3,731,520 in its opening weekend. It dropped to #6 on its second week but would stay in the top 10 for four weeks before finally dropping to #11 in week 5. Tremors had a budget of $10 million and ended up grossing $16,667,084 at the domestic box office, which made it financially successful though far below projected numbers. In 2019, Kevin Bacon hinted that Tremors only made "a fifth of what the charts at Universal said it would." Its creators blamed the subpar theatrical performance on its marketing campaign; S.S. Wilson felt that the film was not well promoted once its release date was delayed, while Brent Maddock stated the theatrical trailer was "cringeworthy" and likely deterred audiences.

Critical reception

Tremors was hailed by critics for its diverse cast and humor. As of May 2020 the film holds a "certified fresh" rating of 88% at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 43 reviews and an average score of 7.24 out of 10, with the consensus: "An affectionate throwback to 1950s creature features, Tremors reinvigorates its genre tropes with a finely balanced combination of horror and humor.
James Berardinelli praised Tremors with a 3/4 star rating, feeling that "horror/comedies often tread too far to one side or the other of that fine line; Tremors walks it like a tightrope". Roger Ebert gave the film a 3.5/4 rating and wrote "It's long been known that we will like a film more if we like its characters. Horror flicks and monster movies seem oblivious to this fact, but Tremors is the one to finally break the mold." Ty Burr of Entertainment Weekly gave Tremors a B+, saying "Tremors is the Slacker of monster movies: bemused, improvisatory, willfully low-key...most of its errors can be overlooked and forgiven, which is rare for its genre." Richard Harrington of the Washington Post called the film "a delightful throwback to such '50s and '60s films", and Jeffery Anderson of the San Francisco Examiner gave the film a glowing 4.5/5 star review, calling Tremors "effectively terrifying when it needs to be, effectively exciting when it needs to be, and effectively hilarious when it needs to be, Tremors may very well be the best horror film, the best action flick, and the best comedy of the year".
In some less enthusiastic reviews, Vincent Canby for the New York Times remarked that the film "was clearly more fun to make than it is for us to watch", and Variety gave the film a C- on the basis that Tremors "...has a few clever twists and characters but ultimately can't decide on what it wants to be: flat-out funny, which it's usually not, or a scarefest, which it's usually not either." Gene Siskel initially gave the film a negative review, stating "most of the secondary characters aren't compelling and its horror conventions are lame...Tremors could make a cute short subject but it doesn't sustain itself as an entire film", but later gave the film a positive review in his book Cinema: Year by Year 1894-2001, saying "Tremors was one of the few monster movies to get the formula right."

Home releases

While only a modest hit at the box office, Tremors went on to become a massive hit on home video purchases, rentals, and on television, becoming one of the most rented films of 1990. Because of this, it has gained a very large cult following over the years.
Tremors debuted on VHS on April 1, 1990, on Laserdisc on April 16, 1996, and on DVD on April 28, 1998. The film was released on Blu-ray on November 9, 2010 and again on September 17, 2013, as part of the Tremors: Attack Pack for region 1. In the United Kingdom, the Attack Pack was not released on Blu-ray; instead, the second, third, and fourth films were released on Blu-ray separately on August 5, 2013.
It was released on 4K UHD Blu-ray by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment in July 8, 2020.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack for Tremors was composed by Ernest Troost and released in 2000. The album contained nine tracks from the film, as well as four additional tracks, also composed by Troost, from Bloodrush. For promotional purposes, the album was released as a limited edition CD.

Graboids

The Graboid is an ancient species of. According to UGO.com, "Graboids are to the desert what sharks are to the ocean". Graboids advance through several radically different life cycle stages.
Graboids are described as subterranean animals, superficially resembling gigantic worms or grubs, with long cylindrical bodies. When fully grown, a Graboid will be up to long, and across at the widest point, and weigh 10–20 tons. Graboids have no eyes; they do not need them, due to living underground. Their heads consist of a massive black armored beak, which is used to push aside the dirt while digging. The beak opens like a grotesque flower; it consists of a wide upper jaw, a thinner lower jaw, and a pair of hooked mandibles, one on each side. In , they are reported to have a semi-rigid internal structure, much like the cuttlebone of cuttlefish.
Graboids have three long powerful snake-like tentacles, which are prehensile and can have at least a good reach; possibly up to or greater. Each of these tentacles terminates in a toothed mouth of its own. It is unclear if they bite off and swallow food on their own, or if they are simply used to get a better grip on prey so it can be dragged into the creature's jaws. Normally kept retracted in the Graboid's throat, these tentacles were initially mistaken for the whole creatures, causing the characters in the first Tremors film to underestimate the size of their underground opponents. The Graboid's common name is derived from these prehensile tentacles, which 'grab' prey and pull it back down the Graboid's hungry gullet. At times, these tentacles appear to be semi-autonomous, hissing and writhing like snakes. Food is typically swallowed whole, though early in the first film, they are shown to be capable of dismembering and decapitating prey.

Life cycle

A sequel, ', was released in 1996. A second sequel, ', was released in 2001, followed by a prequel, ' in 2004. These three sequels were all made with direct involvement from S.S. Wilson, Brent Maddock, and Ron Underwood at Stampede Entertainment. Following an 11-year gap, ' was released in 2015, with the franchise's sixth inclusion, ', in 2018. These two films were made by Universal 1440 Entertainment without any involvement from Stampede Entertainment. All Tremors sequels thus far have been released direct-to-video without a theatrical release, though Tremors 2: Aftershocks did receive a brief limited theatrical run. Another direct-to-video sequel, ', is set to be released in 2020.
In 2003, the franchise spawned a television show titled . The show aired in 2003 on the Syfy Channel but was canceled after one season. A 60-minute pilot for a second television series also titled Tremors was filmed in 2017. However, no further episodes of this show were ever filmed.

In popular culture