TREMORS (1990)

Phil Congleton returns for his final Digging Star Wars installment of 2022. But, as a wonderful birthday present to me, he's agreed to continue as our guest writer in 2023! Until then, be weary when the ground shakes beneath your feet. It could be...

Tremors (1990)

Merry December, everyone! I picked Tremors (1990), for the month of December, because, if you remove Christmas and New Year's Eve from the equation, what do you have for December? Earl Bassett's birthday! Well, the guy who plays Earl Bassett, in Tremors (1990). The great Fred Ward, who we sadly lost earlier this year, was born on December 30th, 1942. The older-wiser partner of Kevin Bacon's Valentine (Val) McKee, who just needs one reason to leave Perfection, Nevada for good, finds himself leading the members of a small town, against a nightmarish sight. It is a nightmare that resembles giant, killer worm-creatures, under the sands of Perfection. The film is a great shout-out to the wonderfully, entertaining science fiction films of the 1950s. Tremors (1990), was supposed to be released in November, 1989. But, due to salty language, the MPAA slapped the film with an R rating. The film was pushed back, while it was re-edited throughout the month of December, 1989. This is when the film went from an R rated film to a PG-13 film. It ended up being a fortunate change for the movie, because it opened up the gates to a larger audience, which helped the film become a box office success. It was finally released on January 19th, 1990. A few years ago, this film got its 4K Blu-ray release on December 15th, 2020, along with the rest of the direct-to-video films in the franchise. The Tremors films were the perfect escape to enjoy, during the peak days of the pandemic.

Photo by Chris Mich

What is so good about this movie is the spectacular tribute it gives to classic, science fiction movies of the 1950s. Tremors (1990), directed by Ron Underwood [City Slickers (1991)], was totally developed as a way to capture the charm of that sub-genre. The setting is perfect. It's in a small, dusty Nevada town, reminiscent of classics like, THEM (1954) and Tarantula (1955). It has the right kind of characters, developed just right, for a film like this. The antagonistic monsters created for the story have that classic 1950s feel to them. I'm not going to spoil it for those who haven't seen it, but Tremors (1990), does blend the 1950s with the 1990s in a very cool way. Underwood channels these aspects and throws in some influence from John Carpenter, especially in some of the night scenes.

The cast is great. Heavy hitters from the 1980s, like Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, headline the cast. A fan favorite, Michael Gross (who just finished his awesome run as Alex P. Keaton's father, Steven, on the hugely successful, 1980s sitcom, Family Ties (1982-1989), plays the right-wing, gun slinging, conspiracy shut-in, Burt Gummer. Burt's character would become the glue that kept the whole Tremors franchise together. It is a legacy, held over the last 35 years, consisting of sequels and TV shows, that are still being produced today. It is his character that threads its way through the decades and became the legacy character that everyone wanted to see again and again. Complimenting Burt in this film is country great Reba McIntire as his wife, Heather.

In a nutshell, giant sand worms are terrorizing the small Nevada town of Perfection and its up to our cast of characters to stop them before they wipe the town out. What makes this film so good is the unseen terror below the sand, which doesn't make its appearance known, until halfway through the film. It's that same plot device found in the old 1950s science fiction movies, which inspired its creation. The mood in the film, enhances the fear, by utilizing the unknown, to emphasize the terror below the ground. The pacing moves with a slow reveal because part of the fun is not knowing what these things are. It could become silly, like some of those old movies, but not in this film. The stylized direction and the expert cast sell the idea. This film actually has uncharacteristically, good character development found throughout. That is a rare aspect in a film like this. It makes Tremors (1990), a really good movie. It totally is a modern, science fiction, cult classic.

8.3 (B MyGrade) = 8 IMDB, 4 Stars Letterboxd

"There's a Tremor  in the Force..."

Back in September, in my blog entry about The Dark Crystal (1982), I avoided the normal plan of writing an article about a movie, that inspired the Star Wars saga and instead, I wrote an article about two motion picture entities (Jim Henson Productions and the Star Wars franchise), who had a mutual, back-and-forth, sharing of inspiration, towards each other and their films. That is what December is like too, as I do a similar comparison this month with Tremors (1990) and the Star Wars franchise, most notably Return of the Jedi (1983) and the Disney+ TV series, The Book of Boba Fett (2021). It begins on the deserts of Tatooine, in Return of the Jedi (1983), as Jabba the Hutt sentences Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), to the Great Pit of Carkoon, which contains the dangerous Sarlacc. The Sarlacc is a monstrous, shark-toothed, tentacled, ghoulish-looking monster, who lives under the sands of the desert. The Sarlacc grabs its prey with its tentacles, ensnaring them. It pulls its captured, helpless prisoner down into the pit, which actually is its mouth and they disappear under the sands forever. It's dinnertime now and our rebel heroes will be its next meal.

If you're like me and old enough to remember the original theatrical versions of the original Star Wars films, you can relate to what the original special effects looked like in the early 1980s, compared to today's special effects used in the updated versions of those same movies, most notably, the 2011, Blu-Ray, re-release of Return of the Jedi (1983). In the original version, the Sarlacc pit looked like a pit with teeth and a couple of tentacles. It didn't have much of a personality. Even when people fell into the Sarlacc's mouth, there wasn't much energy or life in the creature. The lack of energy in the Sarlacc didn't hinder the original film too much because most of the action, along with the general direction of the scene, revolved more around Han, Luke and the gang trying to escape from Jabba the Hutt. The Sarlacc was just a necessary annoyance to dispatch first. It also helps that true computer effects had not really been in use yet. Special effects, for something like this, were still pretty-much being done the same way they were in the 1950s. That consisted of models, puppets, green-screens, stop-motion and any other practical, physical effects you can think of. It worked for the 1980s, but George Lucas was a smart guy. He knew the Sarlacc scene needed some extra juice added to it. But, what would that look like?

We jump to 1990. By the 21-minute mark of Tremors (1990), Fred Ward's Earl Bassett and Kevin Bacon's Val McKee have stumbled across the sickening sights of a man dead on top of an electric tower, old man Fred decapitated in his front yard, his herd of sheep slaughtered and the town doctor's station-wagon submerged under the sandy dirt of the Nevada desert. At this point, all the characters think there is a murderer on the loose. This is when they discover that a road crew on the main highway are dead too. To make matters worse, a small rockslide is blocking the road out of the valley. We, the audience, know this is not a human being doing these crimes, but we haven't seen what is really doing the killings yet. The characters still think there is a murderer on the loose, until Earl and Val return back to Perfection with an odd passenger clamped to the axil of their pickup truck. The passenger resembles a six foot long, snake-like creature, that's been torn apart, when their truck pulled away from the road crew site. This is the beauty of Tremors (1990) and other films like this. The early scenes in the film, that feed the audience bits of information, with important moments needed, to help us figure out what the mystery creature is. That mysterious unknown, that some film directors, like Ron Underwood, can hide from the audience. That slow-reveal, which helps to increase the intensity and suspense in a horror film. As mentioned before and as everyone knows, that snake-creature ends up being a tentacled-tongue-like appendage, that comes out of the mouth of the giant sand-worms found in Tremors (1990). They grab their victims with the tongue-appendage and pull their dinner into their mouths, just like the Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi (1983).

The rest is history. As Tremors (1990), moves along, the group of characters in that film start to resemble the ragtag group of characters in Return of the Jedi (1983). This is really felt with the three main characters, Val, Earl and seismologist, Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), who have an interesting resemblance to Han, Luke and Leia. The other supporting characters in the film sub well for Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2 and Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams). As time went by, the Tremors franchise moved into the direct-to-video world of entertainment. Tremors (1990), would be the only film in the series, that received a national-wide, theatrical release in theaters. By 2011, the franchise would release three direct-to-video sequels and a terrible TV series, which lasted 13 episodes on the SyFy Network. The sequels were not bad, but they weren't great either. They do have a cult following and to-date consist of seven films, that have been seen by millions. They are a part of pop-culture. Going back to the main point, the Star Wars films were being released on Blu-Ray in 2011 and they would receive another update to the special effects with that release. Finally, the Sarlacc developed a personality, with an actual head, instead of looking like a pit with teeth. It could be a stretch and I'll leave you with the final decision, but the Sarlacc had a much bigger resemblance to the Tremors creatures, once 2011 showed up. When you watch The Book of Boba Fett (2021) on Disney+, you see it even more, when Boba Fett tries to escape from the belly of the Sarlacc in the first episode. It could go both ways too. Even though the Tremors sequels released since 2011 have really bad stories to them, the special effects have improved. It is another example of creative entities sharing mutual inspiration in an already busy field.

This ends the year 2022. I had a great time writing for Digging Star Wars this year. I want to thank everyone for their support for film/movie appreciation and for reading my blog entry here on Digging Star Wars. I especially want to thank Chris for his support and guidance in this quest. I was very happy that he asked me to be a guest writer on Digging Star Wars for this year. I guess I did a pretty good job, because he has asked me to come back for 2023. So, have a happy New Year and Phil Meets the Movies will return in 2023, with more stories and analysis of the movies. The history of film is always fun to explore.

About the Author

Phil Congleton is a lifelong, but retired, film buff, who worked in television for 30 years and produced some small independent films in the 1990s. He just loves the art of film. You can read more of Phil's film reviews on Letterboxd.