Tremors

1990 horror comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Inhabitants and a visitor from a desert community fight off some nasty underground creatures.

What exactly is "an ass that won't quit"? I've heard of legs that won't/don't quit, but I'm not sure I would even be interested in seeing an ass that won't quit.

I'm filling in gaps from the year 1990 and for whatever reason started with this cult classic that I'd never seen before. I didn't realize that Kevin Bacon was such a big draw in 1990. His name on this particular poster is right at the top and nearly as large as the title of the movie. The poster also, you'll probably notice, is a visual reference to Jaws.

For about the first half of this, I found it really enjoyable. The humor wasn't connecting even though the performers, especially Bacon, were working very hard to make them work. You do have to appreciate a movie that opens with Kevin Bacon urinating off a desert cliff. Tremors establishes this dumb guy camaraderie followed by some gnarly harmonica rock. The longer you have to spend with these fairly flat characters, the less interest you have in them. Michael Gross and Reba McEntire's lovable gun nuts might be an exception, but I doubt it.

The real stars of the show are the critters causing all this subterranean mischief and the darkly comic violence they cause. This is one of those monster movies that gives you little glimpses of the monster at a time, suggestions of their menacing power. As the movie showed off more and more of these creature special effects, I got a little bored with them. Actually, I think this movie lost me with the pole-vaulting sequence. But early on, the critter cam scenes and some ingenious kills kept me intrigued. The woman's car being sucked into the ground while "Dropkick Me, Jesus" (my vote for the greatest religious song of all time) played on her A.M. radio, a scene with a dragged jackhammer, characters being slurped right into the ground, death by dehydration, an avalanche of rocks. The monsters burrowing underneath these characters' boots won me over by being just as smart as the human characters and a whole lot nastier. And you're as nasty as a human being, you're really nasty.

So this is a cult classic worthy of attention even if it loses steam around that pole-vaulting scene.