and
There are two films which stick out in my mind as my first brush with horror, way back in the child days. One was Puppet Master, a pure grade B-Movie about a team of psychics being murdered by sentient toys, which still holds a place in my heart today (the 4+ sequels not so much). The other was Tremors, a movie that I had only seen the climax of once as a mischievous kid staying up past his bedtime, but the scene was enough to stick in my mind all these years later. I’ve seen Puppet Master, but up until this point I had never tried to watch Tremors, although I have seen an episode of the short-lived TV series, which was still called Tremors after shifting the entire franchise to a monster-of-the-week format for some reason. For the purposes of this marathon, I decided to go back to Tremors and finally see if the hype was real. Here’s my conclusion:
Directed by Ron Underwood (which has got to be someone’s porno name) is an action-horror film released back in 1990, the same year as Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane’s Addiction, which isn’t relevant at all. Kevin ‘Six Degrees’ Bacon and Fred Ward star as Valentine and Earl, handymen who live in the city of Perfection in the vague American southwest, a city with a population of about a dozen people. Val and Earl are men with ambitions far greater than Perfection provides, and plans with making their fortune in the big city of Bixby. On the day of their departure however, people start dying, seemingly sucked into the very Earth itself. Upon closer investigation, it turns out that Perfection is now home to strange wormlike creatures named Graboids, that have a lust for human flesh and the ability to tunnel through the dirt like a fish through water. It’s a battle for survival as Val, Earl, their seismologist friend Rhonda and the rest of Perfection try to route these horrible new beasts from their home, before they’re grabbed by the Graboids.
Were this a more serious movie, you could get a huge amount of mileage on the tension a monster like the Graboids provides. A monster that not only attacks you if touch the ground, but also if you make the slightest bit of noise? Scary as all hell. Honestly,, even though Tremors does make use of some of that tension it seems to drift more towards action and comedy over straight horror, sort of like the tonal shift between Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. Not to say that Tremors is bad, because it’s a fun, goofy little movie that, like Return of the Living Dead or Night of the Creeps, is a monster movie that pokes fun at monster movies. If that’s the kind of movie you’re looking for this Halloween, why not give it a try?
No comments:
Post a Comment