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Stampede! Wake up Earl! Wake up! Get outta the way! Stampede!
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Tremors is a 1990 American western-themed monster horror comedy film directed by Ron Underwood, produced by Brent Maddock, and S. S. Wilson, and written by Maddock, Wilson, and Underwood. Tremors was released by Universal Pictures and stars Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter, Michael Gross, and Reba McEntire. In the film, tired of their dull lives in the small desert town of Perfection, Nevada, repairmen Val McKee (Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Ward) try to skip town. However, they happen upon a series of mysterious deaths and a concerned seismologist Rhonda (Carter) studying unnatural readings below the ground. With the help of eccentric survivalist couple Burt and Heather Gummer (Gross and McEntire), the group fights for survival against giant, wormlike monsters hungry for human flesh.
The film is the first installment of the Tremors franchise and was followed by five direct-to-video sequels and one prequel: Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001), Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004), Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015), Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018), and Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020). A television series titled Tremors: The Series aired from March through August 2003. A second television series was set to air in 2018 after a pilot had been shot with Bacon reprising his role for the first time since the original film, but multiple networks including Syfy passed on the series.
Plot[]
Valentine "Val" McKee and Earl Bassett are handymen working in Perfection, Nevada, an isolated settlement in the high desert east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. They eventually get tired of their jobs and leave for Bixby, the nearest town. As they leave, they discover the dead body of Edgar Deems, a fellow resident, perched atop an electrical tower, still grasping the tower's crossbeams and his rifle. Jim Wallace, the town's doctor, determines that Edgar died of dehydration. For some reason he was apparently too afraid to climb down.
Later on, an unseen creature kills shepherd Fred and his flock of sheep. Val and Earl discover his severed head and believe that a serial killer is on the loose. Two construction workers ignore Val and Earl's warning and are killed by the same creature when they drill the ground with a jackhammer, causing a rock slide. Val and Earl try to find help after warning the residents, but find the phone lines are dead and that the rock slide has blocked the only road out of town. Out of sight, a snakelike creature wraps itself around their truck's rear axle; it is torn apart when Val stomps on the accelerator and drives away, and is discovered when they return to town.
Val and Earl borrow horses to ride to Bixby for help. They come upon Wallace and his wife's buried station wagon near their trailer, but the couple is missing (having been killed the previous night). As they press on, an enormous burrowing wormlike monster suddenly erupts out of the ground, revealing the snakelike creature to be one of the worm's many tentacled "tongues". When their horses abandon them and flee, the men run off with the monster in pursuit. The chase ends when the creature crashes through the concrete wall of an aqueduct, dying from the impact. Rhonda LeBeck, a graduate student conducting seismology tests in the area, stumbles onto the scene; she deduces from previous readings that there are three other worms in the area. Rhonda, Val, and Earl become trapped overnight atop a cluster of boulders near one of the worms, and surmise that the creatures hunt their prey by detecting seismic vibrations. The trio then find some discarded poles and use them to pole vault across some nearby boulders to reach Rhonda's truck, narrowly escaping the creature.
After the trio return to town, all three remaining worms attack the settlement. Val saves Mindy, who is unaware of the creatures’ presence in town, after the sound of her pogo stick lures one of them to her. Meanwhile, Rhonda gets tangled in barbed wire from a broken fence and another one of the creatures moves to kill her. Val manages to stun the creature with a pickaxe and helps Rhonda to escape. Inside the general store, the worms attack again and kill owner Walter Chang, forcing everyone to hide on the town's various rooftops. Meanwhile, survivalist couple Burt and Heather Gummer manage to kill one of the creatures after unwittingly luring it to their basement armory. In town, the two remaining worms start attacking the building foundations; they knock over a trailer Nestor is standing on, allowing them to drag him under and devour him. Realizing they must leave town, Earl, Rhonda, and Miguel distract the monsters while Val commandeers a track loader and chains a semi-trailer to the rear. The survivors use it to try and escape to a nearby mountain range. En route, both worms create a sinkhole trap that disables the track loader, and the survivors flee to some nearby boulders for safety.
The group begins to lose hope of escape until Earl gets an idea to trick the worms into swallowing Burt's homemade pipe bombs. The strategy kills one worm, but the last one spits a bomb back towards the survivors, forcing them to disperse as the explosion sets off and destroys all but one of the remaining bombs. Val lures the final worm into chasing him to the edge of a cliff and then explodes the remaining bomb behind it. The resulting explosion causes the worm to accelerate so fast that it charges through the cliff face, where it plummets to its death onto the rocks below. The group returns to town and call in the authorities to begin an investigation, while Earl encourages Val to pursue a romantic relationship with Rhonda.
Characters[]
- Fred Ward as Earl Bassett
- Michael Gross as Burt Gummer
- Kevin Bacon as Valentine McKee
- Reba McEntire as Heather Gummer
- Finn Carter as Rhonda LeBeck
- Bobby Jacoby as Melvin Plug
- Ariana Richards as Mindy Sterngood
- Tony Genaro as Miguel Sanchez
- Charlotte Stewart as Nancy Sterngood
- Richard Marcus as Nestor Cunningham
- Victor Wong as Walter Chang
- Sunshine Parker as Edgar Deems
- Michael Dan Waggner as Old Fred
- Conrad Bachmann as Dr. Jim Wallace
- Bibi Besch as Megan Wallace
- John Goodwin as Howard
- John Pappas as Carmine
- Tom Woodruff Jr. as Graboids (uncredited)
Trivia[]
- According to Burt in the TV series, he's lived in Perfection for 17 years at this point.
- Tremors was re-released on Blu-ray on November 9, 2010.[1]
- This is the only Tremors film to not be released direct-to-video.
References[]
| Tremors • Aftershocks • Back to Perfection • The Legend Begins • Bloodlines • A Cold Day in Hell • Shrieker Island |