Revis­it­ing Tremors, the cult mon­ster west­ern with a sense of humour

Ron Underwood’s Tremors opens with Valen­tine McK­ee (Kevin Bacon) stand­ing on the edge of a rocky cliff, and uri­nat­ing onto the ground far below. He is first shown from the front in an extra-wide shot too dis­tant to allow any close detail to be seen. He is then shown from behind in a medi­um shot – but by the time he turns around to face the cam­era he has already done up the zip on his jeans.

Con­se­quent­ly, in both shots, his ​‘trouser snake’, though key to what has just hap­pened, remains invis­i­ble, in a touch of what is as much coquet­tish flir­ta­tion with the view­er as prud­ish deco­rum. ​‘Val’ then gives his old­er pal Earl Bas­sett (Fred Ward), asleep in the back of the pick-up, such a loud and rude awak­en­ing that the alarmed slum­ber­er falls out and onto the ground, still wrig­gling in his sleep­ing bag like a worm. Con­cealed snakes. Worms in the dirt.

It is all care­ful fore­shad­ow­ing for a crea­ture fea­ture in which giant pre­his­toric nema­to­da – soon earn­ing them­selves the local nick­name ​‘graboids’ – will sur­face from their hid­ing places beneath the earth to eat any­thing that moves or makes a noise, includ­ing the already tiny human pop­u­la­tion resid­ing in the ​‘city’ of Per­fec­tion. Indeed, the bril­liant title of Brent Mad­dock and S. S. Wilson’s orig­i­nal script was Beneath Perfection.

Yet even before the worm turns, Val and Earl are in a hur­ry to get out of town and away from their dead-end jobs as work­ers for hire. ​“Nobody han­dles garbage like we do,” com­plains Val, adding: ​“This is low, we have to set our sights a lit­tle high­er” – and that is before they both get show­ered in shit while try­ing to emp­ty a cis­tern. There is a self-con­scious reflex­iv­i­ty to Val’s words, as they com­ment not just on the low-rent career – but also on the trashy B‑movie genre – in which this odd cou­ple has become trapped.

Yet try as they might to escape their nar­row hori­zons, one thing or anoth­er keeps under­min­ing their dream of depart­ing for bet­ter prospects else­where. Plus, as Val sug­gests, here, in this wide val­ley, they have ​‘free­dom’ – free­dom not just to do what a man’s got­ta do, but per­haps what a man desires to do too.

There is cer­tain­ly a ques­tion mark over the pre­cise nature of the rela­tion­ship between these two men who both work and live togeth­er. Val may talk about his ide­al (i.e. unat­tain­able) woman, and when the grad­u­ate seis­mol­o­gist Rhon­da LeBeck (Finn Carter) vis­its Per­fec­tion to do some field­work, she may come between the two men, but nonethe­less, Val and Earl are the Bert and Ernie of ​‘handy­men’, always squab­bling – and fin­ish­ing one another’s sen­tences – like an old mar­ried couple.

Mean­while, every time they try to trans­gress their small town’s lim­its for a big­ger, brighter future togeth­er, their jour­ney keeps being stopped, whether by the dis­cov­ery of human cadav­ers or by rock-fall road­blocks. Soon these cow­boys find them­selves pulled right back into the cen­tre of Per­fec­tion and under siege along with the remain­ing towns­folk (includ­ing a gun-nut sur­vival­ist played by coun­try singer Reba McEn­tire, who also pro­vid­ed the film’s clos­ing song), as they are belea­guered by destruc­tive, hun­gry and fast-learn­ing mon­sters of the under­ground which come with a decid­ed­ly phal­lic appear­ance, and whose ever more insis­tent pres­ence can no longer be denied.

Tremors com­bines the gigan­tic worms from Dune and (a hilar­i­ous­ly slowed-down ver­sion of) the cross-coun­try truck dash from George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (1981), while get­ting every­body to play the floor is lava over a very wide desert area. Pro­pelled by impres­sive prac­ti­cal effects, this is an oater-inflect­ed mon­ster movie which ful­ly embraces its own icky absur­di­ty and lit­er­al­ly low cul­ture – but the film’s hid­den weapon is a strong focus on char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. For by tak­ing its time to intro­duce the denizens of Per­fec­tion, and to show the eccen­tric inter­ac­tions between this mot­ley crew, Underwood’s fea­ture gets us to like and care about all those who are endan­gered, so that we can laugh along with their ban­ter even as we wor­ry about their fates.

Here com­e­dy and hor­ror are per­fect­ly bal­anced on a cliff’s edge – which is also where Tremors began, and where it ends. For Val will ulti­mate­ly be once again atop the rocky out­crop, sur­vey­ing from his ele­vat­ed posi­tion the splat­tered land­scape of genre beneath, while still glee­ful­ly tak­ing the piss. Now that this Valen­tine is lit­er­al­ly caught between Earl and Rhon­da, between homo and het­ero, and between a rock and hard place, a snake will burst its head out once more, in a glo­ri­ous­ly pre­pos­ter­ous piece of ring com­po­si­tion that finds mon­strous expres­sion, ejac­u­la­tion even, for all the film’s buried sex­u­al ten­sions, even as the drag­on is defeat­ed, or at least once more repressed. From this cli­mac­tic act was spawned a batch of straight-to-video sequels, and even a TV series spin-off, sug­gest­ing that these worms had legs.

Tremors is released as a UHD Steel­book for Zavvi, 4^th July, 2022, by Arrow Films

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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