Retrospective Film Review

Tremors (1990) • 30 Years Later

Natives of a small isolated town defend themselves against strange underground creatures which are killing them one by one.

Folk in the 1950s feared science, as we’d reached a time when self-extinction through nuclear weapons was possible, so cinema stepped in with reminders that science might save us as well. For every giant mutated insect, there was a plucky scientist able to defeat it. This positivity resurfaced during the 1990s revival of monster movies — The Relic (1997), Mimic (1997), and Virus (1999) — which not only updated the science but the military muscle. Jurassic Park (1993) cleverly commentated on this story structure as the leads explicitly scrutinise the gross mishandling of science for the sake of entertainment. But three years earlier, a far smaller monster movie had taken the opposite approach…

Tremors follows best friends Valentine ‘Val’ McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward), down-on-their-luck handymen determined to get the hell out of their hometown of Perfection, Nevada. But after discovering a string of grisly…