Tremors
Hot damn, that’s some fine old-school hillbilly elegy. An extremely low cosmopolitrometer meter which ain’t reactionary bullshit. I won’t touch any sequels with a 10 foot pole.
Oddjobbers extraordinaire and overall janitors Fred Ward (older and wiser) and Kevin Bacon (hotshot, loses all rock paper scissors game) are just doing odd jobs in their extremely small town (population 14). They know just about anybody, but the work sucks, their personal freedom to sleep under the stars is not enough to offset absolute crap conditions. They want better, and they head for the only place they know: the next town over. Except they never get there.
At first it seems they have reasons to stay: some larger job has come up, and they even meet the next female graduate student from the nearby university studying seismology. They refuse all that for the land of milk and honey that is Bixby, Nevada. The only road in or out of the valley is being repaired, but what makes them stop is the body of a fellow worker.
It seems he had died of a workplace injury, but he stayed on a electricity post for days, very afraid of something. After delivering the body to the local doctor, off they go, but when another body comes up, this cannot be a coincidence. By this time, the body count includes only the road workers and some farmer dude, but it will rise up.
Our protagonists accidentally kill one of the monsters terrorising their town, but he’s not the only one. All they regroup in the central convenience store, and think of a plan to escape the town, or most likely, trying to make a buck.
We meet the rest of the town inhabitants. The Chinese American store owner who just wants to make a buck. The single mom with her daughter. The Mexican labourer. The single father with the annoying teenage kid. The prepper couple with encyclopaedic gun knowledge.
Hijinks ensue, where all these people play a gigantic, multi-homed game of The Floor is Lava. Some people are eaten by graboids, but most make it.
They try and fail to escape to the mountains, but manage to kill the monsters, by either blowing them up real good, and finally tricking the final one to jump into a canyon.
In the end, our protagonists are really moving to Bixby, but after extreme prodding and awkward conversations from both parts, the blue collar hotshot hillbilly dude gets the educated graduate student.
This is one those 50’s monster movies with a little more budget, and a better attitude towards woman and minorities. It’s played completely straight, which makes it hilarious. The graboids are a mix of Dune sandworms, and Frank from Men in Black II.
The university student is the smartest person around, most people laugh in the face of danger and just want to make a quick buck, the gun nuts are actually for gun control, they don’t hand a loaded gun to the irresponsible kid in any circumstance. A motley crew of working class heroes.
Besides the protagonists, the prepper woman is an actual country singer, she sings the credits song. The store owner is from Big Trouble in Little China. But more important is the little child is the UNIX girl from Jurassic Park!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.