In sharp contrast to yesterday's DeepStar Six, today's film is well written, well acted, well paced, and enjoyable from top to bottom. Tremors is a modern monster classic carries the spirit of fifties science fiction and perfectly balances horror and comedy. Directed by Ron Underwood and staring Kevin Bacon as Val and Fred Ward as Earl, two down-on-their-luck handymen trying to escape their dead-end existence in Perfection Nevada. When they try to leave their tiny, isolated town, Val and Earl discover the body of a resident high on an electrical tower, dead from dehydration. The deaths outside the town begin to pile up as the surviving residents try to piece together just what exactly is killing so many people. Burt (Michael Gross) discovers a snake-like creature attached to the back of Val and Earl's truck that had stalled it out previously. With the only road to the closest signs of civilization blocked and all communication outside the valley cut off, Val and Earl try to make it to Bixby (the closest town) on horseback, but are attacked by one of the monsters. Not only are these creatures much larger than the two previously thought (about 30 feet in length) with the smaller snake like creature from earlier being only the full creature's tongue, the monster also travels underground, able to move quickly without being seen and ambush its prey. The pair heroically run away from the creature upon seeing it and fall into a cement trench, where the monster tries to give chase, but kills itself by running head first into a cement barrier. A grad student named Rhonda (Finn Carter) who is studying seismology finds the two men and the dead creature and determines, thanks to her monitoring of the local seismic activity, that there are three more creatures in the valley.
Unlike a lot of other monster movies that try to pad out their running time with go-no-where dialogue scenes and thin character development, Tremors actually contains a lot of genuinely humorous dialogue exchanges between interesting and well developed characters, mostly in the beginning of the picture before the monsters are revealed. Although the film does make us wait for a creature 'unveiling' a good thirty-five minutes into the movie, once the monsters are shown, we get to see them a lot and the practical effects are not disappointing. This is one of the movies I saw in my childhood that I really latched onto for its fast pace and well thought-out story, and of course, the monsters. I am happy to report that Tremors still holds up after two decades and many repeat viewings. It's a treat to watch every time and I cannot stress how much you should stop whatever you're doing right now and see this movie.
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