Tremors is considered a horror flick, but it's pretty corny for horror, especially considering the movies coming out today. It's one of the very few horror movies that I would even watch, and that's probably only because I was 7 years old when I saw it for the first time on TV.
It's one of those movies where you look at the cast and are like Kevin Bacon? Must be good. Then scroll past a couple no-names, and then you see Michael Gross and you have to blink a few times. Seeing him in the cast not long after finishing Family Ties was kind of hilarious. And then you see Reba McIntyre and you just wonder how this movie even got made.
The premise is already outrageous when you think about it. I mean, maybe most horror movies are. Have you seen Blood and Honey? Yeah, anyway...
The movie didn't have a ton of laugh out loud humor, nor any famous one-liners. But it stuck out in my mind all these years because for a while after seeing this movie when I was 7, I was scared of the sand and would only walk on the crab grass. My parents probably thought I was doing some kind of hopscotch routine, but little did they know I was traumatized for a bit.
Admittedly, 7 is a little young to be watching a movie like that, but take solace in the fact that it was edited for TV so the swearwords were bleeped out (more on that in a bit) and some of the more horrifying scenes were cut out completely.
The scene that scared me the most as a young child isn't even a big deal in the grand scheme of the movie but I was really affected by it - to the point where I would close my eyes even into adulthood - every time I rewatched it. I'm talking about near the beginning of the movie where the Doctor and his wife are building their trailer in the desert and the generator suddenly stops working because the "Graboids" (no, I can't call them that, sorry) - Tremors sucked it under, and he went to go check it out. His death was slow as the wife tried to grab him when he was being slowly sucked down.
everyone around, and was being swung wildly while people screamed around him, wasn't even that big of a deal. And I think the reason, for me anyway, was because that was a scene that was cut out of the TV version, and I'd never seen it until I was an adult.
And I swear, the scene with the Doctor's wife in the car being sucked into the ground was the most unbelievable part of the entire movie because A. She had no car keys so how was the radio playing and the headlights on? and B. Like, what kind of sand can you even walk on that a creature can suck a car into?
But that scene where Michael Gross (Doomsday prepper!) and Reba McIntyre shoot the shit out of a Tremor that broke into their basement was bad ass and lovingly unexpected for the Family Ties father.
In regards to the swearing, I have a funny story to tell. So, growing up watching cable, bleeping was everywhere. I was so used to it that it didn't even bother me most of the time (I don't even watch cable TV anymore - is bleeping still a thing?), and there was a particular scene after Val and Earl kill their first Tremor and check it out, and Val says "I found the ass end!", and in my little 7-year old mind, I must have thought that "ass end" wasn't a swear word because it hadn't been bleeped. When my parents and I were moving to our acreage when I was in the 4th grade, and we were watching our mobile home trying to make it around a tight bend with a telephone pole in the way, and I said "They're having trouble with the ass-end" - yeah. I got yelled at. Worth it though.
[As I type those words into Google Search and prepare to quickly close my screen at the potential results, I find these gems:
and my faith in humanity is restored.]
All in all, it's a fun movie and if you haven't seen it, I would recommend it (maybe not highly, but I digress), maybe with a few shots of alcohol for an even better time.
