Viking Night: Tremors
By Bruce Hall
November 27, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
He just wants his life to mean something. Is that so wrong?
So it is with Val and Earl (Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward), who have spent years scraping by on odd jobs in the small town of Perfection, Nevada. They lay barbed wire, they clear land, and they pump septic tanks. They're handymen - which is a polite way of saying they've got little to do and even less to show for it. Each is dying for a fresh start, but they make too much money to starve, and not quite enough to get out of town. There’s no point to their existence, and there’s never going to be unless something big happens.
It begins in the form of Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), a chatty graduate student stuck testing seismology equipment out in the desert. Rhonda’s getting some interesting readings, Val is secretly looking for someone to settle down with and Earl seems to have some kind of voyeurism fetish. So it's only natural they should team up when some of the locals and their livestock turn up dead in a series of gruesome, Chupacabra style drive-by-dinings. Something has decided to drop by Perfection for lunch, and it isn't going to leave until someone kills it, or it runs out of things to snack on.
There are only a dozen or so people in town, and the mysterious creatures turn out to be a little smarter than their prey. The townsfolk find themselves cut off from civilization, forced to wait it out, fight it out, or just die with dignity. Val, Earl and Rhonda are joined in the standoff by a truly multicultural assortment of characters including a Hispanic man, the wisecracking Asian bus driver from Big Trouble in Little China, a very Aryan mother and daughter and two Red State gun nuts played by the dad from Family Ties and Reba McEntire.
That's right. It's got all this, AND Kevin Bacon. On paper it sounds like the coolest monster movie ever made, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not.
But there's something about Tremors that won't allow you to hate it. Director Ron Underwood is also known for City Slickers and Pluto Nash - one of which is pleasantly pedestrian, while the other is Pluto Nash. Tremors falls somewhere in between the majesty of Billy Crystal covered with cow placenta and...well...whatever the hell Pluto Nash was supposed to be. One minute you're reluctantly enjoying yourself, and the next you want to close your eyes and think about how much more fun you could have had spraying your palms with Rogaine, or eating a pound of cheddar cheese.
If you think that was mean, I have more. The soundtrack is a mashup of forgettable ‘80s pop. All the necessary story beats are there, but they’re not well staged and do little to provide the movie with momentum. The dialogue is largely horrendous, no more so than when Rhonda speaks. She sounds like the nerdy kid scientist on every Nickelodeon show ever, peppering her sentences with words like “subterranean” and “unprecedented” in places where “underground” or “holy shit!” would sound far more natural. I can’t really tell you who to blame for this, since it apparently took three people to write the screenplay. God only knows how bad it would have been with four.
Still, like finding a hundred dollar bill in a cow pasture, there are bright spots. Almost every character has one great moment, and while there are only a handful of solid laughs in the whole movie, there are (almost) enough to keep you engaged to the end. And the same script that thinks you’re too stupid to distinguish a geologist from a septic tank technician without help occasionally rises above itself, thanks to some fairly inspired casting.
Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward are the best thing about this movie. They share solid chemistry and exude the kind of easy, earthy charm necessary to keep such a pair of idiots likeable for 96 minutes. Michael Gross and Reba McEntire are breakout characters that try to steal the film but can’t, since Tremors never fully commits to any of its gags. Still, their gun toting, anti government, survivalist lifestyle provides some easy laughs early on. And when an Unprecedented Subterranean Menace cuts your small town off from civilization, it doesn’t hurt to have a pair of nutbags with a pile of Uzis at your disposal.
Of course Tremors is a monster movie, and monster movies rarely work without a convincing monster. Oddly, this is the part of the film that’s most and least successful. In some shots, the animals look very much like the foam rubber improvisations that they are. In others they’re almost convincing, even just short of excellent. But most of the time, they simply appear to be Muppets. Occasionally the inconsistency is jarring enough to take you out of the movie, and the visual effects as a whole are at best, disappointing. Not good.
But nobody is going to mistake Tremors for Oscar bait, are they? It’s a bad movie but it does aspire to more than garden variety blood and guts - so is it really too much to expect it? And if it’s really so bad, what is it that sets Tremors apart from other low budget misfires and makes it such a cult favorite? I’ll tell you why - Tremors has personality.
Bacon, Ward, Gross and McEntire breathe just enough charisma into their characters to make things interesting. But by the third act, the creatures themselves are bestowed with enough individuality to keep you watching to the end. It’s a development that might have helped more had it come earlier in the film, but if you’re watching a horror-comedy in the first place, it’s enough to make Tremors worth your time. Laugh a little, be glad it’s not you, and cut it some slack for having the guts to try.
Just like your friendly neighborhood party crasher.