Tremors (1990) Was One of the Last Bastions of Classic Practical Effects

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is a subscriber request! This delightful creature feature was brought to you by my friend Dan King, who loves Tremors more than anyone you know. Dan, along with two-time Dust On The VCR guest writer Ryan Kindahl, co-founded the Obsolete Media production company here in Alabama. (They have a Substack too!) They also recently made a terrific short comedy called Last Request that played at Fantastic Fest among other film festivals; in fact, if you’re here in Birmingham, you can see it next weekend at the Underground Shorts showcase at the Faraway Theater! As for Dan himself, he’s a great guy, even though he’s a Detroit Lions fan, which is kind of weird. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

I’ll never forget how disappointed my high school friends were when they brought home copies of Metallica’s 2003 album St. Anger.* They’d waited six long years for an hour and 15 minutes of garbage. After their scathing reviews, I avoided it altogether. I’ve still never listened to most of that album.

However, there is a scene from Some Kind of Monster, the quietly heralded 2004 documentary about the making of that unheralded album, that I think about from time to time.

It’s the scene where legendary guitar god Kirk Hammett confronts the band about their decision to steer away from guitar solos on the new record. Drummer Lars Ulrich went so far as to call guitar solos “a little outdated.” (In front of Kirk, which was very rude.) Kirk doesn’t hold back when it’s his turn to speak, though: “That’s so bullshit,” he proclaims, before wisely pointing out that the band’s decision to modernize their sound will likely backfire: “If you don’t play a guitar solo in one of these songs, that dates it to this period. That cements it to a trend that’s happening in music right now. I think that’s stupid and I think it’s totally trendy.”

It’s easy to agree with Kirk, especially now that 20 years have passed and nobody seems eager to reevaluate St. Anger. Reasons for disliking that album are all subjective, of course, but the band’s leaning into nü metal and modern rock trends is hard to argue.

Reader, I like to think that Metallica’s guitar solos are a lot like the practical effects in Tremors.

This delightful desert-bound creature feature about giant sand worms attacking a tiny Nevada town came around at a curious time for genre films. It was the dawn of CGI, after all. Tremors carried a budget of no more than $10 million, which pretty much guaranteed that advanced visual effects were off the table. But other films had already begun staging CGI sequences. Total Recall, released less than five months after Tremors, featured some of the most expensive and impressive computer-generated imagery that audiences had ever seen.** James Cameron had already gotten into the game too; The Abyss, released in 1989, features some CGI water effects, and by the time Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released the summer of 1991, audiences had already started to acclimate to this new cinematic technology.

But allow me to state something that you already know: Most early CGI looks like shit.*** There are some exceptions—Jurassic Park, for example, still looks great—but the 90s and even the 00s were full of big noisy films that are now dated by lousy digital imagery. One might say that movie studios were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.

The beauty of Tremors, though, is that it’s not at all concerned with where cinema is going. In fact, director Ron Underwood and his crew were deliberately hearkening back to the past in numerous ways.

First of all, there’s the fact that Tremors is a pretty blatant Jaws ripoff.**** Never mind the fact that Jaws predates Tremors by a solid decade and a half—when a formula works, it works, and Universal Pictures (yes, the same studio that gave us Jaws) knew that. Hell, we’re still getting Jaws ripoffs nowadays.

I noticed another thing on this rewatch, though: Tremors employs a classic slasher movie trope, which isn’t surprising given that it was released right on the heels of the slasher peak.***** We’re introduced to these sand worms (which are called “graboids,” by the way) the same way we’re typically introduced to Jason Voorhees or Michael Meyers: by watching as the mostly hidden creatures attack and kill characters that are only in the film to be turned into monster food. This happens three times if you include the dead man who scaled a power line and died of thirst.

But the film’s best cinematic callback is the most obvious one: Tremors is clearly borrowing from creature features and monster movies of the 40s and 50s. Back in those days, all you needed was a big puppet or some convincing stage makeup (and maybe a rising movie star or two) to put butts in seats. And Tremors did just that—it didn’t set the box office on fire, but it made a profit.

And you know what? By reaching back to the classics rather than attempting to create CGI sandworms, the creators of Tremors gave us some kind of monsters that feel timeless today—just like a great guitar solo. Sure, the creatures look goofy as hell, but that’s the point! They’re not the least bit scary, but they’re charming, they’re gross, they’re funny, and if you believe the characters in the film, they also smell terrible. I don’t think you could ask for much more than that from a film like this.

*That’s right. I buried the lede this week with 250 words about Metallica. Can you tell that my editor John is still on paternity leave?

**Sure, the skeleton scene in Total Recall is outdated, but I think it actually still looks pretty cool. They were wise not to attempt to recreate entire human bodies back then.

***Yes, even Terminator 2. It’s one hell of a Pepsi commercial, though.

****This is not a pejorative. I happen to love Jaws ripoffs, actually.

*****Maybe Kevin Bacon brought a bit of his Friday the 13th knowledge to the production?

Tremors is now streaming on Peacock, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.