Tremors 2: Aftershocks is the 1996 sequel to the 1990 creature feature, Tremors, directed by S.S. Wilson and distributed by Universal Studios.
I saw the first Tremors movie in the early 2000s. I don't recall exactly what year it was. It was a movie that one of my brothers brought home after borrowing it from one of his friends. Of course I enjoyed it, but I wasn't aware that it had any sequels (or prequels or TV series for that matter). It wasn't until several years later that I learned of the two sequels and one prequel when I came across the Tremors Action Pack at a store. It contained all of the movies in the franchise.
My first thought was that the sequels were unneccessary, especially in this era of endless sequels and remakes. I felt that the first movie had tied up all the loose ends very well. The monsters were gone, the remaining Perfection residents were safe and Val had found his own personal happy ending.
Despite my initial thoughts, I decided to give the other Tremors movies a chance, so I popped Aftershocks into my DVD player and went from there.
The movie has two returning stars, Fred Ward as Earl Bassett and Michael Gross as Burt Gummer, along with some new faces, Helen Shaver as Kate (White) Reilly and Christopher Gartin as Grady Hoover. In supporting roles are Marcelo Tubert as Ortega, Marco Hernandez as Julio and Jose Rosario as Pedro.
If there is one thing that irritates me is huge blaring mistakes that are 100 percent avoidible, such as this one:
Those are not graboids. Those look more like Langoliers. You know, from that movie based on the Stephen King novel? Take a look.
Not a perfect match, but close. There's really no excuse for this. They had pictures of the main cast on the title screen, why didn't they get the monsters right? And not only did they get the monsters wrong, they look horrible. But anyways, what really matters is the movie itself and not the abysmal job done by the title screen developers.Our movie begins with a title card telling us we are in the Petromaya Oil Field in Chiapas, Mexico. Chiapas is the southern most state in Mexico and shares a border with Guatemala. At first all we see is the side of a lush, green moutain range. We see more of the scenery throughout the movie which shows a similar setting as the first movie, a valley hemmed in by moutains. While most of the camera shots don't show the surrounding country side as much as was in the first movie, what you do see is beautiful. Too bad it was filmed in California and not in the real Chiapas. Despite it being in a similar setting, I didn't feel the isolation that I did in the first movie. I don't know why exactly, but to me it just isn't there.
After the title card, we focus on the mountain range, slowly a pair of feet and legs come onto the screen. Turns out there is a Mexican man scooting along an above ground pipe. It is clear by the expression on his face that he is scared of something. He makes it to the end of the pipe and turns to see the ground moving. A graboid. To get to a nearby van the man jumps from oil barrel to oil barrel, all the while the barrels behind him are being knocked over by a still unseen graboid. The man is knocked to the ground and quickly gobbled up by the monster. I thought this was a decent scene. The knocking over of the barrels and moving dirt are both well executed as is the swallowing whole of the man, but these are nothing new. We saw all this in the first movie. Good thing we got the old stuff out of the way...sort of.
In the next scene we are told that we are back in Perfection and we run into a familiar face, Earl Bassett. Earl is threatening his herd of ostriches with barbeque sauce. Yum, ostrich burgers. Anyway, Earl has not had it easy since the last movie. While his pal Val McKee has gone onto marry Rhonda and has prospered, Earl made some poor investment decisions and had to return to Perfection. He is not happy about this.
A Las Vegas taxi pulls up at his door and Ortega and the cab driver (Grady Hoover) step out. Ortega wants Earl to come down to the oil field in Chiapas and get rid of the graboids that had been killing his workers. He is willing to pay him $50,000 for each graboid he kills and the Mexican army will supply him with any equipment he needs. Grady is a huge fan of Earl and Val and so had offered to help Ortega track Earl down. Earl rejects Ortega's offer.
Ortega: "We have already contacted your partner, Senor McKee, but he was unwilling to help us."
Earl: "Sure. Val married a good woman. Why would he want to die?"
Grady follows Earl into his trailer and tries to convince him to agree to the deal. Earl is not easily persuaded. He feels he has already missed his chance, that opportunities to make something of your life only come around once in a lifetime. He directs Grady's attention to a poster on his wall. It is a Playboy centerfold from October 1974. Earl tells Grady that the reason he keeps the poster on the wall is to remind him to not chase after things he's never going to get.
This gets us to the core of this film. This is Earl's movie. You can't really say the first movie belonged to any one character, but you can say that for this movie and the third in this series. This movie is about second chances for the two returning characters, Earl and Burt, but for the most part, it is for Earl. Later on in the movie we learn that Kate Reilly is in fact October 1974. Earl is finally going to get the things he deserves (if he can make it out of his situation alive of course). If there is a moral to this story it is that if you don't take risks in life you will never really live. You will be stuck in the same place for eternity. Some risks are bigger than others of course...graboids.
Or maybe I'm reading to far into it.
Anyways, Grady tells Earl that now he has another chance and convinces him to go to Mexico. Grady asks to accompany him and Earl agrees.
Earl: "Well, maybe you will come in handy. When they're eating you, it'll give me a chance to get away."
Earl and Grady arrive in the oil fields and are introduced to Kate (a geologist working for the oil company) and her assistant Julio and the mechanic Pedro. Julio and Pedro...sounds like graboid chow to me, anyways...
Earl and Grady get to work killing graboids using themselves as bait. I had initially wondered why the army wasn't brought into deal with the monsters. Grady is asked the same question by Julio. Grady explains that since the graboids find prey by sound, they only want one source of sound to lure them in. A large group of people would cause the graboids to spread out and attack.
Earl uses his expertise on killing graboids and they spend the next day or two blowing up monsters with remote control cars and dynamite. Eventually they find that there are dozens of the creatures under the ground so they hurry back to the oil's main headquarters so that Earl can phone in reinforcements. Reinforcements by the name of Burt Gummer.
We find Burt sitting watching War movies in his basement. He tells Earl that he has been really busy lately, but we get the feeling that he was in the same situation as Earl before Earl went to Mexico to kill graboids. Even Burt's wife Heather had left him. Her reason was that Burt had become too hard to live with after the Soviet Union fell. Without the threat of global war, Burt couldn't find much meaning in life. As they talk, the camera pans out to reveal a graboid head mounted on Burt's wall. Very appropriate.
Safe to say Burt was ecstatic at the chance to relive past glories and he does love guns. He rushes down to join Earl and Grady.
Burt arrives in a massive, six-wheel military truck that has an arsonal of weapons and 120 pounds of ready to eat military rations. The next scene is of Earl, Grady and Bert killing more graboids, Burt loving every minute of it.
But, that night everything changes. We are introduced to our new monster. Turns out that each graboid carries three smaller versions of itself with legs inside it. Earl and Grady have a run in with three of them, but kill one and manage to escape, noticing that they are attacking anything warm. They hear other graboids letting loose the new monsters inside them. Earl and Grady hightail it back to the main compound. This scene is well done and pretty tense. It is night time. You can't see anything. At the beginning of the scene, you don't really know what is going on.
Next we find Burt driving along, talking into his tape recorder where he had been documenting his graboid killing expedition. He stops to look at a map and is attacked by several of the new monsters and we cut to black.
The next day Earl and Grady arrive back at the compound in time to save Kate from the new monsters. Burt joins them soon after, looking shocked and covered in monster guts. His truck has only suffered minor damage. This is one of the best scenes in the entire movie.
Burt: "I feel I was denied critical, need to know in-for-mation."Grady: "We're sorry Bert. I mean they just changed all of a sudden."
Kate: Common Bert, what happened?"
Burt: "Well, when the radios went out I decided to return to the refinery, but enroute I find I'm in an AMBUSH situtation. Must've been a couple a dozen of these things. Well, I dropped the first wave with semi auto fire, but they just kept coming. Sheer luck most of them were in front of the truck, so I popped it into six wheel and rammed 'em down. The ones that got on board I handled with a combination of small arms fire and hand to hand techniques...I am COMPLETELY out of ammo...That's never happened to me before."
I can't decide whether or not it would have been better to actually watch the event Burt is describing. Gross' performance here is spot on. Burt is a total badass and his description of the previous night's events cements that fact in our minds, even though we didn't get to see it. Hmm, I guess I would like to have seen it, but I do like the descrition of it. Oh well. Actually, thinking of my next point, it is probably better that we didn't see it and get to picture him taking a platoon of those things out on his own in our head.
The puppet effects in this movie are amazing. When the new monsters (they are not named in this movie) are shown as puppets, they look great. They do indeed look like they have come from the graboids. They are suited for walking above ground, but they still posses graboid features, such as the beak. But, for the most part, the monsters look bad as CGI. There are a few instances where they're far enough away that you can't see the poor CGI effect. It's not the worst CGI I have ever seen and since this movie was made in 1996 I can forgive them fully. I care more about the story, acting and characters than CGI. It does appear that the people that did the CGI put a lot of effort into it as far as they could. I'm sure there were money constraints involved.
Over the course of the remaining movie they discover that the new monster can replicate itself by eating. This is where Burt's 120 pounds of rations comes into play. A monster had hitched a ride under his truck. They also figure out that the animal sees through infrared, or through sensing body heat, much like a rattle snake does.
Of course, Earl, Grady, Kate and Burt defeat the new monsters and go off into the sunset, so to speak. As they wait for someone to come looking for them, Grady tries to get Earl on board with his graboid themed theme park idea.
Over all, this was a great movie. I would give it an 9/10. Not bad for an unnecessay sequel. This movie manages to combine comedy, action and dangerous critters into something just as enjoyable as its predecessor. I wasn't bored with this movie for even a moment. It was true to the first movie and true to its genre as a whole.
One thing I really like about this series is that they make the monsters somewhat believable. In the first movie we saw that they moved about with spikes and sensed movement through vibrations in the ground, which are abilities that exist in real animals, such as worms and moles. They do the same thing with the new monsters. They see through body heat given off by other living things. That is exactly how rattle snakes see.
Something I look forward to when viewing these Tremors movies is seeing what small things in the movie will end up having an impact on the plot and events as they unfold, such as the 120 pounds of food and Playboy centerfold in this movie and the cliff and stampede story in the first movie. Many horror and monster movies have foreshadowing in them and the same is true with these movies, but they aren't initially obvious.
I highly recommend this movie. Despite the fact that it is a sequel, I don't feel you have to watch the first movie to be able to understand this one. It's a fairly simple premise. People go out to kill a monster and it changes into a new monster.
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