Review By Paul Mount, 3 out of 5 ack in 1989, the original TREMORS, starring Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon, was an unexpected critical, if not box office, hit. Harking back to the cheap thrills of 1950s B-movie monster chillers, TREMORS was a breath of fresh air, a guilty pleasure for those of us in on the joke and a thrilling fun joyride for newcomers to the genre. But, as the featurette on this new DVD suggests, TREMORS was never expected to become a franchise (shudder) but here we are with Part 3 – and I’m pleased to report that it’s a sprightly, lively little romp which bodes rather well for the upcoming Sci-Fi Channel TV series.
We’re back in Perfection, Nevada (hence the title), the one-street shanty town of the original where Bert Gummer (Michael Gross, the only survivor from the cast of the first movie) has become an unofficial Graboid-hunter, monitoring the constant evolutionary changes of the underground monster worms. Relatives and descendants of characters from the original now populate Perfection and, in a nice twist, the town has become a bit of a tourist attraction, with its own dodgy theme park ride as a couple of witless entrepreneurs take gullible tourists around the Graboid’s desert burrowing grounds and mock-up Graboid attacks for added excitement. But then the Graboids reappear for real…and they’ve developed some rather nasty offspring.
Like the original, TREMORS 3 is played largely for laughs. There’s little in the way of gratuitous blood and gunge, the script is fast-paced and witty and whilst the effects display their rather low-budget origins, there’s some convincing CGI and an amusing new breed of flying Graboid dubbed the Ass Blasters because of their ability to propel themselves through the air by…er…well, maybe I’ll leave that to your imagination. A bright and breezy way of wasting ninety-odd minutes.
THE DISC: Largely set during daylight, the picture is sharp and colourful with a nice if unexceptional sound mix. The featurette is typically brief (around 15 mins) but detailed enough for such canon fodder. Trailers for all three films and production notes and cast biogs round out a pleasant little package.
