Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001)

The third installment in the Graboid saga arrives direct-to-video in 2001, which is its own kind of confession. Burt Gummer comes home to Perfection, Nevada, and finds the town repopulated with familiar faces and a few new ones, among them Jodi, who has taken over her late uncle's market, and Miguel, a longtime resident. These characters move through the story without the film stopping to remark on their presence, which is the older, quieter arrangement. A woman can run the general store and fire a weapon at a subterranean worm without anyone drafting a thesis about it. The picture simply has other business.

That business is largely bureaucratic. Government agents arrive to declare the Graboids an endangered species, and the finale converts the town into a federally protected reserve, a conservation gag delivered with a shrug and a punchline. Melvin Plug, the real estate developer, spends the runtime trying to buy Burt's land so he can build a town on it, and he is rebuffed in every scene, a mild reflex against development that never bothers to indict the system behind him. The film is not angry at capital. It is annoyed at one man in a bad suit.

Mostly the movie wants to detonate worms. There are Ass-Blasters, potato guns, MREs wired to explode, and a chainsaw used as a surgical instrument. No sermons are preached. No lessons are distributed. As a specimen for our purposes, it is nearly empty, a creature feature from an era before such films felt obliged to mean something. We observe the absence, record it faithfully, and return the cassette.