TREMORS

“A great, hilarious special effects movie about giant killer worms who desperately want to devour human prey.”
(John Waters)

In the sleepy desert town of Perfection in Nevada, there’s something rumbling: Val and Earl, two handymen who get by with odd jobs, discover the severed head of a shepherd and initially suspect there is a murderer in their paradise. They are not entirely wrong, but the threat is lurking underground. As a seismologist later confirms, huge worms, so-called “graboids”, are racing around the town and sinking their tentacles into everyone they can catch. Ron Underwood’s “Tremors”, better known in German as “Im Land der Raketenwürmer” (“In the Land of the Rocket-Worms”), is a clever throwback to classic B-movie scenarios from the fifties: a troupe of highly diverse, illustrious characters, also including the famous Michael Gross as the trigger-happy gun nut Burt Gummer, have to pull themselves together to even have a chance in the battle against the monster. Unforgettable, for instance, is the nerve-racking pole vault between the cliffs, where they are safe from the “graboids”, while falling to the desert ground means certain death. “Tremors” is splendidly played, smartly directed, and due not least of all to the fantastic tricks and creatures, it is still one of the best – and funniest! – monster films of the nineties.