Tremors (1990)

Tremors arrives from 1990 with the tired courtesy of a movie that wants only to be a monster movie. Val McKee and Earl Bassett, two handymen in the fictional desert town of Perfection, Nevada, would like to leave. Something beneath the ground would prefer they did not. Ron Underwood's film was assembled as a contemporary variation on the 1950s creature feature, and it wears that inheritance without apology. Nothing in its construction suggests an interest in instructing anyone about anything.

The women fare better than the era required. Rhonda LeBeck is a graduate student in seismology who works out the creatures' hunting method, and Heather Gummer defends her basement armory with a rifle and admirable composure. Both are permitted competence. Neither serves as a thesis statement. Victor Wong's Walter Chang and Tony Genaro's Nestor populate the town without commentary, and the Walter Chang role was rewritten from Vietnamese to Chinese to accommodate Wong's casting, a production convenience carrying no thematic freight whatsoever. The film registers its own diversity the way it registers the weather: as a feature of the location.

The picture lacks a message, and it lacks that message proudly. The Graboids are never explained, because the writers found the usual science-fiction accounts too familiar and declined to bother. There is no moral at the close, no reckoning, no cause to which an audience might be recruited. Rhonda kisses Val at the end because preview audiences requested it, which remains the most ideological gesture in the entire production: a studio deferring to market research. The rest is rubble, pipe bombs, and canned pumpkin standing in for monster viscera. The film asks nothing of us except that we watch where we step, and that is a restful thing.