My Shudder Pick of the Month is the 1990 Cult Classic Tremors
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices
When I am depressed, work generally serves as an essential distraction. I am fortunate in that I love what I do. I am even more fortunate in that what I do is watch and write about silly movies. I also write extensively about my lifelong battle with depression and the existential terror of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Writing about mental illness and the apocalyptic current political scene is not as much fun as watching and writing about silly movies. However, for the past two months or so, I have seldom had the energy to watch and write about the kind of pop-culture fluff that has been the core of my ridiculous career.
That’s because my father is in hospice. It’s difficult to think about anything else because that’s the only thing that seems to matter right now. It’s paradoxically easier to write about the anguish and despair I feel as a son and a citizen of a country that is devolving into a dystopian dictatorship than it is to write about cinematic detritus.
My brain isn’t working too well these days. That’s one of the many difficult aspects of being a pop culture writer prone to depression. Do I not respond to a piece of art or entertainment because of its innate flaws or because I am fucking miserable, and consequently find it hard to enjoy anything?
That is an unanswerable question, but I am pleased to report that I barrelled slowly over one of my mental blocks and watched the 1990 cult classic Tremors as my Shudder Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pick of the month.
Everybody’s talking about Tremors! It’s got the Internet going nuts! Tremors mania has swept the country! First Fright-Rags introduced a line of Tremors t-shirts. Then Shudder answered the angry demands of the unwashed masses and added it to their library.
In an unexpected move, Criterion will be releasing all seven Tremors movies in a high-end box set. Or at least I’d like to think that’s in the works. God knows I have been bugging them about it for years.
I chose Tremors because it is pop culture comfort food that’s soothingly familiar, tasty, and goes down easily. It hit me right in the nostalgia sweet spot, as I was a fourteen-year-old degenerate in love with movies when I saw it in theaters.
Tremors grossed just under seventeen million dollars during its theatrical release. It was, at best, a modest commercial success in theaters but developed a loyal and lucrative cult following on home video, where its sequels have flourished.
Ron Underwood made an impressive directorial debut with the beloved creature-feature/horror-comedy. He made an even bigger impact with his next film, City Slickers.
Underwood went on to direct four Christmas-themed television movies, two of which starred Jenny McCarthy, suggesting that he either loved Christmas or was grateful for any work, no matter how unpromising.
The perfectly cast Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward star as Valentine "Val" McKee and Earl Basset, respectively. They’re country-fried good old boys who have just barely eked out a living working as handymen and performing odd jobs.
They’re best friends and business partners who don’t have much, but they have each other. The grizzled duo find themselves in the ironically named Perfection, Nevada. It’s a tiny town in the desert where everyone knows everyone else, as the population isn’t much larger than the roster for a basketball team.
Val fancies himself a lady’s man. There’s a wonderfully post-modern gag where Val sees a woman in the distance and eagerly informs his heterosexual male life partner that he hopes that she’s his type.
Bacon’s hillbilly hero has conventional taste. His idea of the perfect woman snugly aligns with the typical female cinematic romantic lead: blonde hair, long legs, and magnificent breasts.
He’s consequently disappointed to discover that the woman in question is Rhonda LeBeck. As played by Finn Carter in a Saturn Award-nominated performance, she’s an atypical female romantic lead in that she’s a brainiac graduate student in geology who isn’t sexualized in the least. She’s defined by her intelligence and not her looks.
Rhonda is an outsider in Perfection. It’s a town that doesn’t have much beyond a convenience store run by Walter Chang (Victor Wong), which doubles as a post office and the town center.
I’m almost invariably annoyed by product placement in contemporary movies, for moral and aesthetic reasons. They feel like commercials masquerading as background detail.
That is not true of older movies. I fucking LOVE product placement in movies like Tremors because they provide a fascinating glimpse into what the consumer detritus of the past looked like.
There’s not much to Perfection beyond Walter Chang’s store and Burt (Michael Gross) and Heather’s (Reba McEntire of Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) heavily armed compound.
Walter and Heather moved to Perfection specifically because it is in the middle of nowhere. They’re doomsday preppers who have devoted their lives to preparing for an apocalypse that, sadly, may never come.
Doomsday preppers must be disappointed when the world doesn’t descend into madness. What’s the point of all that expense and hassle otherwise?
Walter and his bride are consequently fortunate in that doom descends upon Perfection not in the form of World War III or nuclear spill, but rather in the form of eyeless, sightless giant underground snake monsters whose mouths contain tentacles hungry for human and animal flesh.
These monsters, which Walter deems “graboids” as part of a plan to benefit from their unlikely and unfortunate existence, are essentially giant, evil, prehistoric snake beasts with smaller but equally evil and rapacious snakes in their unholy mouths.
Walter wastes no time monetizing the graboids. The corpse of the first one to die is still warm when he starts selling pictures with the ghoul.
The graboids make their presence felt by devouring minor characters and animals. Val and Earl attempt to flee but discover that due to the unique geographical qualities of the region, escape is impossible.
Val and Earl join forces with Walter, the Gummers, and Ronda, who may not have massive jugs but possess a great deal of knowledge, and whose expertise in geology and animal behavior proves essential.
We feel the effects of the graboids before we see them. Underwood shoots extensively from the perspective of the underground monsters. We see the world the way they do, as an endless subterranean hunt for food.
Since they cannot see, the graboids hunt through sound, vibrations, and noise.
Our human heroes embark on an all-out struggle for survival. They use their wits to outsmart creatures as well as firepower. There’s a great gag where the Gummers defend their home with high-powered weaponry retrieved from a wall in their homes, which are full of massive guns. They don’t just have a gun rack: they’ve got a fucking wall.
In seemingly any other context, this would be wildly excessive, but the Gummers have stumbled into a world where they need all of their guns and more. Gross would go on to star in the direct-to-video Tremors sequels because his character is a fan favorite, and the actor is undoubtedly less expensive to employ than Kevin Bacon.
Tremors is not a new movie. It’s thirty-five years old, yet it has a throwback feel that harkens back to disaster movies from the 1970s and monster movies from the 1950s.
Horror movies are generally as strong as their villains. Tremors has wonderfully inventive monsters who are Lovecraftian horrors realized through practical effects.
Underwood finds the perfect tone for the material. It’s light, campy, and full of good humor and Southern vibes, but also legitimately scary.
Tremors was just what I needed. For 96 carefree minutes, it made me forget the world’s horrors and brought me back to my adolescence, when my greatest joy in life was playing hooky and going to the movie theater.
The world feels monstrous and evil now. That’s paradoxically why monster movies like Tremors are a great escape.
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