Ponty has been promising me a review of a monster film for a little over a week now, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  But I should have guessed it would be this absolute gem of a film.

Tremors (1990) came out when I was five.  No, I did not see it at that tender age; I think I first saw it when I was about ten-years old at a friend’s house.  Every Nineties kid had that friend whose parents didn’t care what their kids did, or even actively encouraged them to be edgy.  I had one such heathen friend, and we watched Tremors one day when I was over there playing.

Man, what a flick!  The Wild West setting, the salt-of-the-earth characters, and the dread-of-the-earth worms!  I had never seen anything like it.  I still remember the scene where one of the creatures busts into Reba McIntyre’s basement, and she and her on-screen husband unloaded dozens of rounds into the beast.

It was also scary, but not in the way horror films typically are.  It was scary because these were just normal people living in the desert and trying to get by, and suddenly they have to band together to defeat this creature that, while fantastical, could actually exist.  There was a plausibility to it—at least to a ten-year old—that made it scary in a visceral way.

I think Ponty captures the film’s charm better than I can.  I’ll turn it over to him.

With that, here is Ponty’s glowing review of a timeless classic:

One of the many things I’ve learned about Americans over the years is that they don’t have a great scope when it comes to geography. Don’t get me wrong. Your people are superb in other ways but when it comes to mapping out your environment, the scale gets a little blurred. Take American TV and film, for example. How often does a character talk of ‘saving the world’ in their sleepy backwater of a town? I’ve heard this quote so many times, it’s become commonplace. In Smallville, in Stranger Things, in The Walking Dead. ‘We could save the world.’ Not MY world, THE world. Erm, no. You’re saving Hawkins, you’re saving Smallville/Metropolis, you’re saving whatever area you’ve laid your hat at that given time. That part in Superman 2 when America surrenders to General Zod and the President deems to speak/submit for the whole world?! Urgh. Don’t get me started. But in terms of an ideal, you seem to know your stuff. Like Perfection, for instance.

A small town in the middle of nowhere with skies that can make a grown man purr. A community that knows each other, looks out for each other, in good times and bad. And in Tremors (1990), these people really do pull together when giant worms burrow into their town with dinner in mind.

Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) are handymen. They eat, work and play together and on this day, of all days, they decide to leave Perfection together. They’re fed up with the crap jobs and the low pay and finally, they pack up their truck and head off to Bixby. Unfortunately for them, they left a day too late, the road blocked by a rockfall. As they return home, they find out along the way that not all is at it seems and soon, they’re leading the fight with the scant population of Perfection to rid themselves of a threat which is right under their feet.

Ron Underwood gives us a cinema masterpiece here, box office gold. It is wonderfully acted; has a great, witty script; the direction brings into scale the dire situation our heroes find themselves in; and the monsters are great. The build up to their reveal is as good as any other decent monster movie. Remember Jaws? The girl pulled under the water at the start? The dog? The kid pulled off his lilo? The fisherman kicking his way back to a broken pier while the wooden float pursues him? Ben Gardiner’s boat? And then the shark itself. The build up is brilliant, raising the terror before Brody realises that a tiny fishing trawler might not have been the ideal transport. Well, you get the same with Tremors.

Bloodied remains on a deserted roadworks. A car found buried in the dirt. A body up a telegraph pole. A head sticking out of the ground. The earth moves, wooden slats are thrown from their fixings and then out it comes, snakes protruding from a sodden mouth:

In Jaws, it’s just under an hour and a half before we first see the shark, which gives us time to get to know the characters, our surroundings and feel the presence of the threat before it actually appears. It’s not as long in Tremors but the process works in very much the same way. Underwood gives us the time to get to know Val and Earl, their idiosyncrasies, their gripes, the people around them, and their roles in sleepy Perfection. He also gives us the opportunity to view the landscape, which is gorgeous, vast, but unforgiving. By the time the town becomes aware of the dangers facing them, we, the audience, become equally aware of the problems present; a hamlet of rickety buildings that could be systematically pulled apart by these things. We’re invested, we become part of their reality, and I love that.

A love interest is provided for Val in the form of Rhonda (Finn Carter), a geology major who is in Perfection measuring seismology in the area. Intellectually, she is massively out of his league, but in the heat of battle, they find common ground, their survival at the forefront of a burgeoning romance.

The best chemistry, for me, is that between Val and Earl, Fred Ward providing a more than adequate mentor role for the wayward Val though their camaraderie best reflects brothers, rather than friends, each spending a good amount of the film trying to one up the other. Their method of making a decision – paper, stone, scissors – is copied in Supernatural, Sam and Dean Winchester paying their own homage to this classic.

There’s something of the Old West in this film. Apart from the small ramshackle town and the wide open desert, there is no tech, just old fashioned know how and a lot of guns, though to be fair, the majority of the weapons are owned by married couple, Burt and Heather, guns and ammo preppers getting ready for Judgement Day. The townsfolk gently mock their lifestyle up until the monsters show up and then realise that their aid will be a boon against these creatures. Heather, played by country singer Reba McIntyre, delivers a line, when Burt (Michael Gross) tries and fails to kill a graboid circling their home, that has stuck with me for years. It’s not memorable in the context of the film but it’s memorable to me because of the way she says it.

I don’t imagine many Americans would give that line a second thought but to me, it oozes pure country and in a film chock full of very different but salt of the earth folk, it just works.

The action sequences play well, the cameras following not only the plight of our terrified inhabitants but also, sliding along the surface of the ground, showing us the trajectory of the monsters as they chase down their prey. The set is small, as is the cast so it gave Underwood free reign to try all sorts of things and he pulls it off in spades. He gets the best out of his actors, who take a great script and run with it, while giving us the time and space to really invest in this story, in its characters. I could not recommend this movie enough.

You could go for a spooky movie this Halloween or, if the mood takes you or if you fancy something lighter than ghosts, demons, and general ghouls, you could opt for a good old fashioned monster movie. Like this one. It doesn’t have the darkness of An American Werewolf in London but it has the scares, it has the tension and it has the monsters.

Happy Halloween!