According to Kevin Bacon, at some point of his career, he called this the most fun he had had making a movie. It does have that kind of a feel. There is another story where he practically broke down about the idea of making such a movie he saw as a career low at the time. He went later on to do a TV series called I Love Dick as the titular character, so that might not have been the last time he felt that way. However, I do think Tremors is a good movie and definitely something to be proud of despite the creature-feature premise.

Spoilers.

Val and Earl are finally ready to move on from the tiny town of Perfection (pop. 14 plus two recent additions), when weird deaths occur and finally the only road out of town is blocked off. Turns out there are monsters under the surface which hunt based on vibrations from the surface. The whole town ends up in a stand-off with those creatures.

You might not think about it, but this is an excellently executed film. Especially the sounds. This actually makes it worth a second watch, if you’ve never done that. You begin to notice how much noise the characters actually make walking around. It might even seem weird at first as you don’t usually get that kind of noises in movies, but it turns out there’s an excellent reason for them.

The monsters (“graboids”) are also well executed. You don’t see much of them, because they are underground, but you do get to see how they affect their surroundings. There’s always this wave of earth, which just looks good and tells you as a viewer what you need to know. There’s also the risk of graboids not looking too good, if we see them for too long on the screen.

I also like the community. In some cases we don’t really know how these people ended up there, but they clearly know each other and have lived around each other, especially Earl and Val, who have a very close relationship. These are people who have chosen to live in this isolated place. They came here to get away from something, so they must have some sort of mutual understanding of their different situations.

Probably because the movie wasn’t successful on it’s initial release into theaters, but went on to be a hit in the home market, this was the only theatrical release despite six sequels (last one of which came out last year), a short-running TV show and a TV movie reboot (although this latter one might have been an unreleased pilot according to some information I found online even though 270 people claim to have seen it on IMDb). I’ve never seen any of them. It’s hard to imagine they could capture the magic of this movie again.