I’ll confess this one caught me by surprise.
I hadn’t heard that there was yet another Tremors movie in the works and yet there it was, for sale on Amazon.
Now for those of you not familiar with the franchise, Tremors started as a a remarkably good monster movie, followed by a a halfway decent sequel which lost the original star, Kevin Bacon, but kept Fred Ward and gave Burt Gummer a far larger part. Michael Gross has been the Dad on Family Ties but gleefully accepted the chance to change his image and loved playing Burt so much that he produced the second sequel — which was really the pilot for his Tremors series.
Only the series never took off and ended after fourteen episodes. But Sci Fi gave it one last gasp with Tremors 4, a prequel set in the Old West, which gave Michael a very different Gummer to play.
It seemed like the end of the road for the Tremors — and frankly, it would have been a good place to end as we finally got to see the complete life cycle of the Graboid.
But it’s hard to keep a good series dead and buried in our age of lumbering zombie sequels and moldy vampiric franchises so in 2016, Burt returned again — along with talk of a TV reboot which would once again have starred Kevin Bacon.
The new film took Burt to Africa where he found even bigger Graboids with strange new quirks, and a son, Travis, he never knew he had.
Next the two went to the Arctic, this time as a team. It gave you the horrible feeling that Travis would soon pick up Burt’s mantle (or battered ball cap, at least) and keep making these movies forever without him.
So the first shock in Shrieker Island is that there’s no sign of Travis. We get some story about how he’s stuck in a Mexican Jail, but you have to wonder why Jamie Kennedy didn’t show up to play him if they’re still planning to make him Burt 2.
It certainly suggests Jamie may be having second thoughts about making an endless series of giant worm movies.
And let’s face it, he picked the wrong movie to skip. Burt has retired to a tropical island, is done with Graboid hunting and let’s face it, Michael looks terrible. He was playing Michael J. Fox’s dad back in the Eighties and those forty years haven’t been kind.
Yes, he’s still as strong and forceful as ever. Just old. Very old.
To be fair, he looks even worse when we first see him, with a traditional castaway wild head of white hair and a ragged white beard — and a suspiciously black mustache in the midst of all that white.
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Jon Heder is here to fill the hole in the script Travis was supposed to fill. He’s the plucky comic relief, working on a wildlife project run by one of Burt’s old girlfriends (and Travis’ mother), Jasmine.
The guy who owns the island that’s home to the nature reserve, Bill (Richard Brake in an enjoyable scenery-chewing performance), runs an exclusive hunting preserve on a neighboring island and has just added the ultimate predator to his collection of game animals: the Graboid. And not just any Graboid, that would be too easy, but instead an all new version cooked up by his own genetic research labs which is even bigger and badder.
It always amazes me in movies like this (and yes, particularly in the Jurassic Park films) that the teams of scientists and businessmen who create these sorts of new and improved critters just can’t see that this is a very bad idea.
But I suppose if they did, then we wouldn’t have much of a movie.
So we have big Graboids on a tropical Isle, a pack of Shriekers who’ve learned a new trick, and one major new menace. The biggest twist is that this time Burt doesn’t have any guns.
Which, you’ll admit, is sort of new — even if he does end up with what amounts to a Western (Movie) gunfighter’s endless supply of ammo — only it’s dynamite this time.
Now, before I even watched this thing, I’d guessed one major plot point which I’m not going to share here, no matter how tempting it might be. Many of you may have guess already, anyway.
For what it’s worth, I rank this one as way better than the last one — and I even think it might be better than Tremors 5, even if Burt does look mummified now.
But I’m really hoping that this time will be the last. I think that dawn has finally come and Tremors is overdue in its coffin. I really don’t feet the need to see any more of these films (not that I ever felt any overpowering desire to see this one, either).
Well, except for that pilot episode of the Kevin Bacon reboot that never was. I’ve got to see that one.
After all, Vincenzo Natali directed it…
rivets on the poster 