Squeakquels!: Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020)

As longtime readers of this site are aware, I like to write about random-ass bullshit, the more random the better. That’s why I’m excited to announce that March will be Direct-to-Video Sequel month here at the Happy Place, the sixth theme month of 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin. 

I know it does not make sense for a year-long online project to take fifteen months and counting to complete but life is complicated, people are fallible and hoo boy did the big 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin idea worked out as planned or intended. 

But I am nothing if not stubborn and determined so I WILL get around to writing up all of the twelve theme months that you voted for even if I have to do so on my deathbed as a wizened old man in a post-apocalyptic future where all of my readers are dead.

It wouldn’t matter to me! Even if I was the last person on Earth and there was no one left to hold me accountable I’d still make a point of living up to my word because my word is sacred. 

Besides, theme months are fun and I have a special emotional attachment to direct-to-video movies. When I started writing for The A.V Club in 1997 as a college kid, I gravitated towards the Video section because the stakes were lowest and the competition non-existent. 

I found direct-to-video movies fascinating for the same reason I’m deeply immersed in the world of self-published books: without having to impress the gate-keepers of theatrical distribution or publishing houses there’s no limit how mesmerizingly, uniquely terrible a direct-to-video movie or self-published book can be. 

I loved the idea that I was writing about movies that were more or less culturally invisible, that seemingly nobody else was writing about because they were so grubby and obscure and small and sad. 

Even the most minor and miserable theatrically released films tend to get reviewed and discussed. A cultural conversation on these motion pictures merits exists, even if it’s not particularly vigorous or flattering. 

Direct-to-video movies, on the other hand, are much less likely to get reviewed and discussed unless they’re Theodore Rex or something, and the whole world gapes in open-mouthed horror at their epic folly. 

The Tremors series has been chugging right along since the theatrical release of the cultishly beloved 1990 original, a genial throwback to monster movies of yore that pitted Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire against underground phallic monsters known as Graboids. 

Tremors didn’t do terribly well at the box-office but it developed a sizable cult following on home video. Kevin Bacon opted out after the first film and Ward after the second but Michael Gross stuck with the series as paranoid survivalist Burt Gummer, a gun nut turned legendary monster hunter. 

Gross reprised the role Burt Gummer in 1996’s Tremors 2: Aftershocks, 2001’s Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, 2015’s Tremors 5: Bloodlines, 2018’s Tremors: a Cold Day in Hell and 2020’s Tremors: Shrieker Island. Christ, he even played Burt Gummer in the Tremors TV series, a one-season wonder that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel and co-starred a pre-Breaking Bad Dean Norris and a post-Welcome Back, Kotter Marcia Strassman. 

Gross didn’t play Burt 2004’s Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (ah, the exquisite absurdity of a third sequel with “Begins” in its subtitle!) but that’s only because it was a prequel that cast him as an ancestor of the character he played in all of the other movies, Hiram Gummer. 

By the seventh entry in the Tremors saga, Burt Gummer had ascended to the level of a Golden God. He’s its Marlon Brando, its Colonel Kurtz, its King Kong. He’s iconic that when Tremors: Shrieker Island closes with a lengthy montage of Burt killing Graboids with a variety of weapons while wearing a variety of hats set to a tremblingly earnest ballad like it’s the damn Memorial Reel at the Oscars it’s ridiculous but also weirdly endearing. 

Gross has served this series of direct-to-video monster movies with distinction. He deserves an Honorable Discharge from this oddly deathless franchise.

Tremors: Shrieker Island opens with malevolent mogul Bill (Richard Brake, best known as Joe Chill in Batman Beyond) leading a hunting party on his private island that allows the very wealthy and the deeply amoral an opportunity to hunt the most dangerous game of all: no, not human, Graboids. 

Ah, but these are not your mother’s disconcertingly phallic underground killing machines. Foolish, foolish scientists have hacked the DNA and genetic code of the Graboids to make them EVEN MORE DEADLY AND DANGEROUS and consequently even more of a challenge for hunters. 

I don’t know who needs to hear this—primarily arrogant fictional characters in horror movies—but if a creature is already an unstoppable killing machine DON’T MAKE IT MORE DANGEROUS. It’s only going to cause more problems and result in your violent demise! 

Bill’s obsession with breeding even deadlier Graboids for the deranged amusement of the impossibly rich causes problems for scientists Jimmy (Jon Heder) and Dr. Jasmine 'Jas' Welker (Caroline Langrishe), who are working on an island near the one where Bill is staging his big hunt and are understandably worried about being devoured by the terrifying beasties Bill is unleashing upon an unsuspecting world.

So he recruits the services of a man whose reputation for mastering the fine art of slaughtering Graboids precedes him: Burt Gummer, who is introduced as a feral creature living in seclusion on a remote island who has become more beast than man in his isolation.

Burt has turned his back on humanity on account of humanity sucking but he cannot resist the opportunity to kill Graboids so he shaves off his shaggy beard, puts back on his signature Cubs baseball hat and joins forces with Jimmy and Jas and a smattering of badasses, male and female, in their bid to take down the Graboids once and for all. 

In true monster movie fashion, the real villains here are not Graboids or Shriekers, dinosaur-like monsters that give the movie its subtitle, but rather the nefarious side of human nature as personified by Bill, who Brakes plays as an evil version of Virgin’s Richard Branson, the ostensible inspiration for every colorful, flamboyant, swashbuckling fictional billionaire character over the last three decades. 

While Bill and his band of hunters have high-powered artillery, Burt and his allies are reduced to using the antiquated weaponry inside a World War II era bunker, namely flamethrowers, machetes and very unstable dynamite. 

Director Don Michael Paul takes a page out of the Jaws playbook and shows Graboids sparingly in the early going, implying much while showing surprisingly little. Paul, who also co-wrote the script, makes the most out of a modest budget: let’s just say that the movie certainly got its money’s worth out of the helicopter it rented. 

I was motivated to watch Shrieker Island out of dewy nostalgia for the original, which I watched in the theaters as a fourteen year old, the perfect age to see a movie like Tremors for the first time. But I was also intrigued by the outside the box casting of the once and future Napoleon Dynamite as a lead in an action movie. 

Heder walks a fine line here in that he’s undoubtedly comic relief, a goofball desperately out of his league hunting monsters but there’s nothing nothing particularly winking about his performance, with the exception of some meta touches involving  the movie Predator. 

Heder seems unexpectedly invested in this nonsense. That’s true of the film as a whole. I wholly expected Shrieker Island to phone it in but it’s a surprisingly solid monster movie that finds a nice balance between comedy, action and horror. 

Tremors: Shrieker Island gave me everything that I wanted in a direct-to-video Tremors sequel, namely Napoleon Dynamite and Alex P. Keaton’s dad going to town on terrifying beasties with a flamethrower and chainsaw respectively. 

I am a simple man with simple pleasures. A whole lot has changed in the three decades separating Tremors and Tremors: Shrieker Island but it turns out I still love watching goofballs kill Graboids, albeit not quite enough to make me want to watch the other five entries in the series, let alone the TV series. 

Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdaccordiontoal/the-joy-of-trash?ref=project_build

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