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| All Images Courtesy: Universal/Arrow Video |
THE FILM:
Several years after the events of the first film, Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) has gone through a whirlwind of briefly being a celebrity when the tale of Perfection, Nevada’s battle with monsters hit the news, then losing all the money he should have gotten from his story rights and endorsement deals due to shady contracts and unscrupulous agents. Now he’s embittered and down on his luck, once again living in a trailer in Perfection, raising ostriches. Then a representative of a Mexican oil company shows up at his door with a problem, and a proposition: graboids have surfaced again, this time in Mexico, and have laid siege to one of the country’s biggest oil fields, killing many of the company’s workers in the process. As one of the only people to face the beasts and live to tell the tale, the company wants to pay Earl big bucks to lead a graboid-hunting expedition, and kill the creatures before they make meals of the rest of the oil workers and anyone else in the area. Seeing a second chance to turn his fortunes around using his graboid expertise, Earl heads to Mexico – with weapons-expert survivalist buddy Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) close behind – sure that they are well-prepared to make short work of the new batch of giant worms. But the creatures have a few unexpected surprises in store, and Earl, Burt, and their new friends soon find themselves in a whole new type of monster fight that they were not prepared for…
Tremors 2 is a sequel done right: it successfully recaptures most of the core ingredients that made the first film such a beloved classic, but it doesn’t rehash the first film, and instead it throws a series of very fun and surprising curve-balls at both the characters and the audience. It shows that it understands the formula of what made the first film so good, and then it changes up that formula just enough, giving us a new and different scenario that nonetheless still has that Tremors magic. It does this with a very sure-handed and smartly-written structure, giving us half a film of the classic graboid action that viewers would have expected from a Tremors 2, before a midpoint shakeup sees the creatures change the game, putting the characters once again off-balance and having to figure out the new rules going into the back half. At this point it is no longer really a spoiler that the creatures metamorphosize – after all, the cover of Arrow’s box art features their new bipedal form, the shriekers – but it sure would have been a surprise in 1996, and the film handles the reveal phenomenally, in a way that really dodges what fans would have expected. And even 27 years later when it is pretty universally known that the second film features a new type of creature, the way their reveal plays out is still very fun and satisfying even when you know it’s coming.
Tremors 2 also does a very interesting, clever job of dealing directly with the notion of fandom, in a way which feels very ahead of its time. Tremors 2 exists almost entirely because the first film developed a huge, grassroots fanbase which directly asked for a sequel: Tremors was not a hit in theaters, and the filmmakers and actors had pretty much written it off as a failure and moved on with their careers, when it surprisingly became a monstrous hit on VHS due to strong word of mouth that built up steam gradually. Between fans literally writing to SS Wilson, Brent Maddock, Ron Underwood, and Universal asking if a Tremors 2 might be in the cards, and Universal’s burgeoning home-video division seeing the dollar signs in the shockingly good rental and sales numbers for Tremors on VHS, the franchise found itself with an unexpected second chance. This is directly mirrored in the plot of Tremors 2: in the film, the graboids and the Perfection, Nevada residents who fought them captured the public imagination and became a viral sensation, with graboid merchandise popping up everywhere, and Val, Earl, and Burt becoming underground celebrities. But just as the first film underperformed in theaters and did not help the careers of anyone involved despite becoming a beloved cult favorite, Earl is still down on his luck, with his viral fame having failed to translate into long-term financial success. The driver who brings the Mexican oil company executive to his door, however, is a graboid superfan: a stand-in for the audience who actually asked for this sequel, asking a weary Earl to embrace his second chance just as enthusiastically as the Tremors fandom asked and eventually convinced SS Wilson and Brent Maddock to make Tremors 2. This character, Grady (Christopher Gartin), remains the audience identification character throughout the whole film, geeking out on-cue to Burt’s excessive arsenal or reminding the other more no-nonsense characters that despite being an imminent danger, the creatures are also really really cool. While some may find his comic relief a bit much, his role in the metanarrative adds a lot of fun to the film: with him in the movie playing a reflection of the audience, even watching it at home feels a bit like watching it in a theater with an enthusiastic crowd.
In a landscape with plenty of mediocre horror sequels, it is pretty impressive that Tremors 2 manages to bring such a fresh and fun twist on the first film’s formula, and that it backs that up with some very interesting postmodern observations on fandom. And it is downright amazing that it manages to do all of this on just a $4 million budget, less than half the budget of the first film. When Universal first started talking to Wilson and Maddock about making Tremors 2, the offer was to give them a larger budget than the first time around: $14 million. But that was conditional on Kevin Bacon returning, and when Bacon turned the film down to do Apollo 13 instead (fair play, Kevin), Universal first wanted to cancel the film altogether, before their straight-to-video division offered to bankroll it for $10 million less than Wilson and Maddock had been promised when they first wrote their script. But by that point the co-creators felt passionate about getting Tremors 2 to the screen, and after many attempts to rewrite, reimagine, and figure out ways to save money, they eventually figured out a way to get it made for the lower budget that MCA Universal Home Video was offering, without sacrificing entirely the scale and the ideas they had in mind. Part of the creative ways they thought of to get the film made at a lower budget? They more or less made the film for free, asking for their promised pay to be put back into the budget instead, and others on the creative team worked for lower rates as well; it truly was a labor of love.
They truly worked wonders with the lower budget: you would never guess that this film was made for less than half the money of the first, as it is very nearly just as good-looking and polished a film. It is once again very well-shot, mostly outdoors in very beautiful locations. The cast is excellent: Fred Ward once again perfectly grounds the film with his mix of affable everyman and gravelly intensity, and Michael Gross once again steals every scene he’s in as the hilariously over-the-top survivalist. Christopher Gartin is very lively and funny as the new comic relief (although some may find him a bit much – he is definitely the Randy-from-Scream of Tremors, take that how you will). And Helen Shaver is excellent as a geologist who serves as both a very strong and intelligent female lead, and a love interest for Earl in a very sweet and convincingly played, all-too-rare-in-movies middle-aged romance subplot.
And then there’s the special effects, which look phenomenal for the budget, and very very good by any standards. The practical effects were handled by the excellent team at Amalgamated Dynamics, who created the graboids for the original Tremors. And while they likely were able to save some money by building off of their designs from the first film (and maybe even recycling some graboid components), the newly-designed shriekers look just as great as the graboids ever did, and maybe even a little better and more lifelike. I would genuinely say that the practical effects in Tremors 2 are just as good as those in the first, despite having less resources. Being bipedal creatures that run around, the shriekers required some CGI as well, to bring them to life in wide action shots, and the CGI work was handled by none other than legendary stop-motion animator Phil Tippett, in one of his first CGI projects. Tippett’s CGI is astonishingly good for a straight-to-video feature from 1996: you can occasionally see the limitations, but for the most part it blends with the practical effects impressively well, and has aged far better than plenty of CGI from years later. I expected it to be the weakest link that this new 4k restoration would be very unkind to, and I was very impressed with how good the CGI still looks, even in this restoration. It’s not Jurassic Park, but it’s pretty unbelievable what Tippett was able to accomplish on such a tight budget, so early in the era of CGI.
I know I’ve just been raving about the great qualities of Tremors 2, but it isn’t without its flaws: as I said in the beginning, it isn’t on the same level as the original, even if it comes impressively close. While the look, effects, performances, and script are all pretty close to being on the same level as the first film, first-time director SS Wilson is not quite as natural and skilled a director as Ron Underwood, and there are definitely times when the directing of Tremors 2 feels a bit more stiff or flat. The actors – especially Fred Ward – are more than capable of carrying their scenes on their own, as are the excellent effects, so Wilson had a lot of help in making his directorial debut as strong as it could be, and for the most part he is successful. But there are moments when the breezy, great-with-actors, natural direction of Ron Underwood is missed. Likewise, while the film still looks great, cinematographer Virgil Harper is not quite the first-rate cinematographer that Alexander Gruszynski who shot the first Tremors is. And then there’s the one thing that this sequel simply can’t re-create from the first film: the original movie’s true secret weapon, the hilarious bromance/odd-couple chemistry between Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward. Grady is a fun comic-relief supporting character, but his dynamic with Ward is fundamentally different. The film comes closest to recapturing the first movie’s character dynamics once Burt arrives in Mexico and he and Earl can banter together, but there will definitely be viewers who just miss Kevin Bacon as Val. It’s not the movie’s fault: its script and characters certainly aren’t lacking. It’s just that Bacon and Ward made such a great double-act, with such lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry, that losing either one of them makes that dynamic impossible to recreate. The rest of the film is so good that most viewers should be able to get over Val’s absence though.
It may have its relatively minor flaws that hold it back from being on the same level as the beloved original, but Tremors 2: Aftershocks really is something of a little movie that could: it comes astonishingly close to the quality of the first film and delivers a great, gleefully fun creature-feature in its own right, compensating for having less than half the first film’s budget with sheer creativity and a driving desire to make something really good. Wilson and Maddock wrote a script which recaptures the joys of the first film while flipping the script on its formula in extremely fun ways, and they managed to make it for a much lower budget than originally promised without losing their larger scope and ambition. The effects are excellent, mixing top-notch practical creature work with CGI that is astonishingly good for this kind of production in 1996. And Fred Ward and Michael Gross are just so much fun to have back, with a great supporting cast to match. It may not be perfect, but for what they were working with, Wilson and company knocked it out of the park. Fans of creature features – and fans of Tremors especially – should have a great time with this one, and it definitely is deserving of the swanky boutique edition that Arrow has given it.
THE ARROW SPECIAL EDITION:
Arrow Video presents their new special edition of Tremors 2: Aftershocks in both UHD and blu-ray versions, packaged in a limited edition hardbox set with a book of writing on the film, and two posters. Unlike the first Tremors, this limited edition does not come with a bonus disc of additional extras, so aside from the book of essays, the disc itself in the limited and eventual standard editions should be identical.
Arrow’s 4k restoration of Tremors 2 looks phenomenal. While it was destined for a straight-to-video release, the film was shot on 35mm, and looks more than good enough that it could have been released in theaters; a fact that this restoration emphasizes by presenting it in its full cinematic glory. The image retains its fine film grain with no noticeable DNR, and detail and clarity are immaculate: the film looks gorgeous. The new 4k restoration really brings out the rich colors in the film: colors and contrast really pop, with the night scenes especially looking colorful and gorgeous in a way that I never fully appreciated. Having grown up regularly watching this film on VHS, seeing it look this good is a revelation.
The extras on this disc are not as bountiful as those accompanying the first film, but since this one was a somewhat more niche direct-to-video title I suppose that is to be expected, and what Arrow has given us is very good. First of all, the disc features two commentaries, the first of which is a very, very informative production commentary by co-writer/director SS Wilson and producer Nancy Roberts. It is a very fun listen, packed with anecdotes about the production and origins of the film, which I would highly recommend to fans. It really will give you an even greater appreciation for all that this film accomplishes on pretty limited resources. The second commentary is by film historian Jonathan Melville, who wrote the book “Seeking Perfection: The Unofficial Guide to Tremors.” It too has a lot of great information, though it is not as fun a listen as the director/producer track. Next up are two new interviews with two of the special effects artists behind the film: pyrotechnics and physical effects artist Peter Chesney, and CGI animator Phil Tippett. Both are extremely interesting interviews with a lot of great details on how the effects were created on a budget. Hearing from the legendary Phil Tippett about one of his first big projects to involve CGI is especially cool. Rounding out the extras is the original 8-minute “Making of Tremors 2” featurette from 1996, which features some very cool behind-the-scenes shots, and on-set interviews with most of the principle cast and creative team. Yes, it’s one of those pretty light and fluffy promotional featurettes, but it is an unusually good one, featuring more behind-the-scenes footage and insights than most, and I really enjoyed it.
Overall this is a very nice special edition package. The extras are not as bountiful as on some other Arrow limited editions, but the extras they produced are very good, and add up to a pretty solid, very informative package, particularly thanks to the director commentary and special effects artist interviews. And Arrow’s 4k restoration is great. Overall this is a wonderful special edition for Tremors 2, the likes of which I truly never thought we’d see. It really does effectively make the case for Tremors 2 as a great sequel in its own right, which absolutely deserves the lavish treatment. I definitely recommend this one, both to fans of Tremors 2, and to people who may have underestimated the sequel and passed on it. Give it a watch: it is a much better and more worthy sequel than you might expect, and this release really shows it.
- Christopher S. Jordan
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