This weekend I watched the most delightful movie about ravenous earth monsters with a blood lust for humans that I've ever seen. It's called Tremors. The story goes like this: in a desolate Nevada town named Perfection, probably since it's nestled in a water-starved valley between mountains and a cliff, the local residents start dying one by one. Considering the entire population is around 10 people, this becomes quite alarming. Now, you'd think that perhaps the local bigot finally blew his lid due to the extreme isolation, but no. Actually the increasingly violent and gruesome deaths are caused by huge, blind, stinky worms that live underground. They can sense vibrations as the towns people run about to and fro. They also have cognitive learning abilities, something the regular towns people seem to have been born without. So as the towns people learn they must get off the ground, the earth monsters (or Graboids, as they are lovingly called) learn how to destroy whatever it is the delicious humans have climbed upon, thus securing one more meal in their quest for constant food. They also have multiple tentacles with grabby mouths that snake out of the gapping hole in their heads.
Luckily, the towns people have Valentine and Earl (Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward), the local gay handymen who live, work and travel together to help solve the Mystery of the Graboid. Luckily for them, they stumble upon a plucky 45 year old geology student, Rhonda, spending her days and nights researching and analyzing the perplexing Mystery of the Seismograph. Then there's Burt and Heather, the local gun enthusiasts, who have a difficult time listening, but can wield a gun like no other. The rest of the cast who isn't dead early on includes Walter, the Chinese shop owner (and only businessowner in town, I'm guessing), Melvin, the local teen bully who has neither parents nor peers to bully, Nancy, the mother of pogo-sticking Mindy, Miguel, the token Hispanic dude, and Nestor, the town dumb ass.
Besides roll-in-the-aisles-with-laughter banter between the stressed-out towns people, the movie is loaded with intense action sequences featuring some of the finest puppetry and animatronic effects ever captured on film, balanced by sweet and tender love scenes featuring one hot threesome between Val, Earl and Rhonda as they're stranded on a rock outcrop over night. Luckily Rhonda finds some poles nearby and they vault their way to freedom (much to the delight of Val and Earl). In another scene after a Graboid makes for a game of Grabass with Rhonda, but grabs only her pleated pants, Val stares lovingly at her panties while sloppily applying gore makeup to her legs. These scenes show that even in a time of crisis, fun can be had at the expense of all.
I won't give away the farm (they all live, except poor, poor Walter) and spoil the fun for you (they kill the last of 4 by running it off a cliff), but I highly recommend investing 96 minutes of your time into a family friendly tale about love, loss, diversity, tolerance and humongous earth worms. A-
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