TREMORS (1990) - ***1/2

I love movies when they don't immediately reveal themselves for what they are. If every other horror movie opens with a kill or a scare tease, TREMORS spends its first 15 minutes or so with Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward as roughnecks making a living from clearing out garbage and emptying septic tanks, bitching about wanting to escape from Perfection, Nevada when they meet up with a cute seismologist chick. See if you didn't know any better, you would think that you had mistakenly rented a buddy roadtrip/romantic comedy.

I think a successful genre movie is one that is working with a horror template that we've seen administered a thousand times before, afterwards, and mostly terrible, but still produce something so matinee fresh and infectiously goofy fun. I think a key reason for TREMORS working is that for a 90 minute creature feature, director Ron Underwood lets his film take its time in introducing the characters and visually laying out the geography of this glorified rest stop in the middle of the desert, so that when the shit hits the fan (or more like the dirt), we know where we are always during the narrative, and actually care about the outcome. In other words, this is the Anti-30 DAYS OF NIGHT.

Much like the 1950s Monster movies that TREMORS is lovingly aping, Underwood has us learn the "rules" about these star beasts scene by scene, showing us instead of some goddamn awkward talky exposition. Take when Bacon and Ward try to escape the town the first time around when they come upon a friend of theirs, stuck on top of an electrical tower, dead for three days from dehydration, with a firm finite grip on his Winchester Rifle. What would cause someone to stay up that high for days until they died of thirst? Because they can sense the "tremors" from your footsteps. Later when the duo try to get out again, they happen upon dead sheep and a hat inside a weird crater, which reveals the head of a victim.They can grab and eat you from underground. Get on top of a building or a giant rock, you're okay. They can travel through loose soil, but not solid objects.

You get the point, and grin wide, when Bacon and Ward declare together: Oh Shit!

There are two cool if simple shots that Underwood should be proud of. First, when a car is being dragged to an Earthly grave by the critters, the radio is accidentally turned on. The next day when Bacon and Ward visit the site, they hear the muffled music, dig until they discover the buried grill of the station wagon, with the headlights still on. Second, when someone in the village says that surely the phone company would notice that their lines have been severed, we cut immediately to a company truck with only two hard-hats and some blood stains at the scene. Really, it's hard to believe that the same director would later shoot the atrocious Eddie Murphy flop THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH.

Anyway, let's admit that the whole concept of the "Graboids" is pretty damn creative for the genre. They're like the midget-size sand worms from DUNE, with snake tentacles reaching out of their mouths, the srength of a bulldozer, but the intelligence of a dog. But the secret reason for them being underground dwellers is that you don't necessarily need to show them constantly to create thrills or tension, and save money on the FX budget. Like the shark in JAWS, just have a fence rattle, a sign fall down, or a building crumble just to know where these unseen pests are at all times.

But the ice-breaker may in fact be the humor. People want to compare this to GREMLINS, but I say it's more in the tradition of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. With the kills and scares, there is a cheese camp element to them, as if the filmmakers are saying to us, "we're making a thriller here, but if this and that makes you laugh, you have our permission." Or at least that is my impression when Bacon punches one of the snake-tentacles. Plus, he also gives us a memorable if idiotic one-liner: "Who died and made you Einstein?!?"

But the biggest barrell of laughs comes from Michael Gross. His part clearly was meant to mock those survivalist gun-nut types, you know the sort with the wet dream that RED DAWN really would happen? I mean look at the casting of Gross, who was the hippie Dad on FAMILY TIES. Yet with his tongue and cheek demeanor, Gross somehow takes a parody and reverses it into sheer awesomeness.

The best scene in TREMORS is when a Graboid invades his basement, and he and his wife empty every machine gun and firearms they own in their insane arsenal, without inflicting any damage. It finally takes a goddman Elephant Gun(!) through the mouth to kill it. Gross nearly steals the show in TREMORS, and in fact would later become the star of the direct-to-video sequels for TREMORS and even the short-lived television series.

TREMORS is quite a pretty darn good movie, even if I think Bacon's redneck accent is too cartoonishly all over the place for my taste, but Ward is blue-collar money here. The casting of Victor Wong is cool, considering he ruled in John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA and PRINCE OF DARKNESS, but damn did his character have to be the cliche greedy Asian businessman?

Also, if the Graboids are blind, then what is up with the Point-of-View shots of them in the soil?