"Tremors" is a little bit of everything. It's got a wonderful composite cast (headed by Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, but very much a team effort with a great supporting team), at times it's quite funny, it does a pretty good job of being suspenseful (although I wouldn't really call it scary) and it keeps you watching all the way through. Best of all - although a bit of romance pops up in the end - it avoids the trap of trying to blend a love story in with everything else all the way through and sticks pretty closely to what the meat of the story is.
Perfection is a small, isolated town somewhere in the desert. A geology student doing research (played by Finn Carter) detects strange seismic activity just outside the town and people and cattle start to mysteriously die, sometimes dismembered in the process. Finally, we discover that strange, previously unknown, subterranean creatures are popping up all around Perfection, devouring whatever they find. This movie avoids the unnecessary - it doesn't try to turn itself into a sci- fi movie, with explanations of what the creatures are or where they came from. The creatures are left as a mystery - they're just there, and the townsfolk have to find a way to survive. This remains a horror-comedy all the way through. It never takes itself too seriously and all of the characters have a certain quirkiness about them (although all come across as believable and realistic in the circumstances, and therefore interesting to the viewer.) So the story was well-written and well thought out. It satisfies in the end.
I thought that Bacon and Ward made a great team. They played off and complemented each other well. Finn Carter was a great choice as the student geologist. She played the part seriously and was taken seriously; the movie avoiding the temptation to simply turn the character into the object of anyone's attention. She's the major secondary member of the cast, although Michael Gross as Burt was also able to steal a few scenes.
The creatures are interesting - like nothing I've ever seen in a movie before, and - as I mentioned - left appropriately unexplained. In the end, this turns out to be a truly satisfying movie that hits a number of buttons and does pretty much everything well. (7/10)
Perfection is a small, isolated town somewhere in the desert. A geology student doing research (played by Finn Carter) detects strange seismic activity just outside the town and people and cattle start to mysteriously die, sometimes dismembered in the process. Finally, we discover that strange, previously unknown, subterranean creatures are popping up all around Perfection, devouring whatever they find. This movie avoids the unnecessary - it doesn't try to turn itself into a sci- fi movie, with explanations of what the creatures are or where they came from. The creatures are left as a mystery - they're just there, and the townsfolk have to find a way to survive. This remains a horror-comedy all the way through. It never takes itself too seriously and all of the characters have a certain quirkiness about them (although all come across as believable and realistic in the circumstances, and therefore interesting to the viewer.) So the story was well-written and well thought out. It satisfies in the end.
I thought that Bacon and Ward made a great team. They played off and complemented each other well. Finn Carter was a great choice as the student geologist. She played the part seriously and was taken seriously; the movie avoiding the temptation to simply turn the character into the object of anyone's attention. She's the major secondary member of the cast, although Michael Gross as Burt was also able to steal a few scenes.
The creatures are interesting - like nothing I've ever seen in a movie before, and - as I mentioned - left appropriately unexplained. In the end, this turns out to be a truly satisfying movie that hits a number of buttons and does pretty much everything well. (7/10)