It’s not a secret that my favorite film of no time is Jaws. I have Jaws puzzles. I have Jaws posters by the score. I have stuffed sharks, a shark poster in the garage where I park my car, and toy sharks with shark cages. I have the Jaws Pops. I have Jaws on VHS, DVD, BluRay and even something called a softcover book. I have the Jaws 2 and Jaws 3 trading cards…the entire series. I love this movie…and my collecting is casual compared to many fans.

But I love the film, Tremors, also but I don’t have one item collected. Why? THEY DON’T MAKE ANY! It amazes me that there is almost nothing. There’s no action figures. Not even gummy graboids. To me, this is the story of a great film that people just missed. This is one of the first movies on my lips when people ask for a great monster movie…and yet so many have never seen it!

Tremors is a throwback to 50’s and 60’s creature features about two somewhat dim handymen that work in a tiny, one road town in the desert pitted against killer carnivorous worms. That’s the story. All the tropes are here: the small town shop owner, the irritating kid, the cute kid, bad judgment, survival talk (the word “plan” is said 20 separate times during the film), and practical effects.

…and as much as I love Universal, they screwed this movie up. The advertising campaign for this flick was TERRIBLE! Couldn’t have been worse. I think the next time I would see a movie this mismanaged it would be Disney’s John Carter. Luckily for Universal, this didn’t result in a $3 billion write-off; it made its money back and then some once it got to the home video market. The movie was made for $10M and made $16M in the domestic box office and tripled that in home video. This launched a franchise that has bridged 30 years and 7 films (so far).

S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock wrote the film after a trip in nature climbing a rock and wondering what it would be like avoiding a creature under the ground. Early drafts were even titled “Land Sharks” but it took some time to develop. The pair wrote some good, successful films (Short Circuit and *batteries not included) and some horrid films (Short Circuit 2 and Ghost Dad) but I suspect these films will be their legacy. 

Director Ron Underwood joined the project and injected some of the zoological detail to the film and really put together the tricky sauce that makes a successful cross genre film. Horror comedy is a tough mix and this one works because it actually took all the comedy out that was not “incidental.” They kept it to what was naturally occurring based on the characters they established and generated through a sparkling script and a pair of boffo performances by the leads Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward. Underwood would follow up Tremors with City Slickers with an Oscar winning performance from Jack Palance, so he knew how to get a performance (let’s not discuss Eddie Murphy in The Adventures of Pluto Nash) and could handle F/X as he proved later in his remake of Mighty Joe Young.

I was lucky enough to see this movie during its theatrical run and it played particularly well with an audience. The viewers laughed when they were supposed to laugh and jumped in their seats when they needed to. A lot of this could be attributed to Ward’s and Bacon’s performance who instantly connected with the audience. They didn’t this by being the stand in for the audience. They were “that guy” we all knew. Hard working but not necessarily brilliant but capable of taking care of themselves. They invited us all along for the ride.

So we join the road trip to Perfection and meet the miniscule (and quickly dwindling) population of the tiny town, with one road going in and out and a subterranean carnivorous worm problem. The Graboids (as the creatures were dubbed by Walter Chang, the local grocer) were good, old fashioned practical effects and provided the necessary menace to bring us our villain.

Included in the population was Walter Chang, the aforementioned grocer, portrayed by Victor Wong, who many genre fans recognize from Big Trouble in Little China. We have button cute Ariana Richards, who went on to be the elder child in a little film named Jurassic Park just a film or two later in her career. Reba McEntire, icon of country music, made her film career premiere as the survivalist wife of Burt Gummer, the only character to move through the entire Tremors franchise. Burt Gummer was a stand out of the supporting players portrayed by a post-Family Ties Michael Gross. Apparently when developing the script, they pictured Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris to possibly portray the character, but I think it is Gross that really made the character pop enough to ground the series for the duration. Heck, if you can survive a pair of films co starring Jamie Kennedy, a few Graboids should be no problem, right?

As Bacon’s love interest in the film was Finn Carter, who I believe brings the right moxy to fill the role of a non-scream queen equal to the comedy team of Val and Earl. But make no mistake, this is the tale of Val and Earl and their absence from the follow up films is apparent from the jump. Their good natured bickering is the type of dialogue you could hear at any job site in the nation…except, of course, it centers on giant slugs that speed through the sand to consume natives.

For Jaws fans like me, there are some wonderful homages. A jackhammer pulled through the road stood in for a barrel and the death of a prominent character mirrored the death of Quint, complete with a little blood on the face as he is pulled below the ground. 

I loved the movie from the moment I saw it in the theaters and as soon as it was available for sell through pricing on VHS (for the uninitiated, often films in the early days of VHS, would first be available for rental pricing at about $80 and later became sell through at $20 later in its run). I hooked up the VHS to my stereo and recorded the entire film onto a 45 minute audio cassette (I had to turn over the cassette to the other side to hear the rest) so I could listen to the film on my drive to college each day. In this way, I really appreciated the vocal performances of Val and Earl which struck me as being the kind of performance a comedy team like Abbott & Costello may have delivered on their radio program in the days of old. I really began to discover the wonderful soundtrack, learning later it was a mix of two composers works. The story goes that Ernest Troost’s original work, characterized by twangy country tones, guitars and harmonicas, was beefed up by a more traditional action score by Robert Folk complete with violins and trumpets. Frankly, I love both of their work and they mix wonderfully in the film. If I had to choose, though, the harmonica bits are what I remember whenever I think of the poor citizens of Perfection.

This is a mainstream film put in the cult film box has always irritated me since this film had the potential to find a much larger audience than it ultimately found. Still, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Except I’d really like some Val and Earl action figures, of course.

Grade: A+

Tremors (1990)