TREMORS 2: AFTERSHOCKS (1996)
Tagline: The Worms have turned.
(Horror, Sci-Fi, Comedy) [PG-13]
A friend of ours, Walter Chang, he named them, then they ate him.
In this one Earl Bassett (played by Fred Ward), gets hired by a Mexican oil company to battle a Graboid infestation along with Graboid enthusiast Grady Hoover (played by Chris Gartin). The Mexican army gives him a giant arsenal, but upon discovering the metamorphosis of the Graboid species, Early finds out he’s out he is going to need even more firepower. That comes in the form of Burt Gummer once again played by Michael Gross. Can Earl and his friends take down the Graboid’s before they kill everyone in sight?
First off, this movie was slated to feature Kevin Bacon and Reba McEntire, but McEntire was on tour promoting her music, and Bacon decided to film some stupid movie called APOLLO 13 instead (hints of sarcasm). Having said that, we still get a pretty decent script and a new version of the Graboid is introduced via metamorphosis called “Shriekers”. Parts of this script are actually better than the first movie, but it does suffer from not making you care about the characters enough in this setting. I mean, it’s an oil company? If this was a small-town family oil company, maybe we care more?
I am not a huge fan of Helen Shaver, but she is pretty decent in this as the only female in the entire film. She plays a geologist who knows a ton about dinosaurs and life on earth, which seems like an odd interest for a woman that works for an oil company, but whatever. It’s likely this was explained at the beginning of the movie, but I was just sidetracked by Earl and Grady whose chemistry is pretty great in this. If the designs of the “Shriekers” look familiar, it’s because you saw a slightly different version of their mandibles in STARSHIP TROOPERS, both designs were done by the same company.
Where this movie drops off from the original is that they used CGI in scenes where it was completely unnecessary. A bit more time and care on this thing and the movie could have been better. In spite of the fact that Burt Gummer becomes the main draw of the sequels, in the first 2 movies, he’s barely tolerable as a character. He’s also probably the only Atlanta Hawks fan I have ever seen in a non-sports movie.
Even though this isn’t a full-blown classic like the original movie, TREMORS 2 does find enough “new” things to do with this world to keep the series moving and is a pretty satisfying sequel. I actually liked Grady better in this movie than I did Kevin Bacon playing Valentine in the original.
For me, this is a solid 4 out of 7 just based on what we got with what the studio had to work with, but I should warn people that you are going to have to be someone that kind of loves b-movies and cheeky humor to enjoy this damn thing.
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