Living in Perfection, Nevada, is a daily reminder that the world has passed you by. With a population of only 17 people and one general store, it’s a place that reminds me of the Texas towns I lived around — sometimes with even less than that — so I can truly see why the people in Tremors dream of leaving it.
But when best buds Valentine (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) come across very large — and very ugly — worms out in the desert, it makes leaving a whole helluvalot easier.
These are two dudes out in the sands putting up posts just to get by, when they manage to mess with a whole mess of these creatures — nicknamed “graboids” — making them the unlikely heroes of the story. With a seismologist named Rhonda (Finn Carter), as well as all the townspeople, they team up to fight the below-earth monsters, which seem to operate on the vibrations in the ground (although one of its six sequels might have changed that; I haven’t seen them all) and represent a species that science is quite late in discovering.
Although Bacon had many bombs at the time — many films I dug, mind you — this video-store hit was seemingly everything he needed to get back into Hollywood’s good graces. That same year, he was also part of the ensemble cast of Flatliners, which recently had a terrible remake; until 2018, this film only had sequels, all made for video.
Featuring an additionally somewhat-name cast that includes Victor Wong, Oklahoma country star Reba McEntire and Family Ties alum Michael Gross — who’s gone on to star in all those sequels — I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Tremors inspired me to always be on the lookout for cryptids in my own backyard, one of the half-dozen or so that saw this flick in the theater upon its original release.
Of course, I never found any … but I haven’t stopped looking. —Louis Fowler
