“My career was really close to ending,” Kevin Bacon says in a new documentary about 1990's Tremors, a movie that bombed so hard at the box office that it’s a wonder it didn’t sink his career (thank Flatliners for again allowing it to flourish). Still, Bacon clearly sees Tremors as an important part of his filmography, and not just it’s become a cult classic over the past three decades.
The documentary, directed by Matthew Snead for Universal Pictures, highlights the struggles and joys of creating the horror-comedy, emphasizing the camaraderie of its cast and crew in addition to the practical wonders of its creature effects. Bacon and Michael “Burt Gummer” Gross lend their voices alongside director Ron Underwood, writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, and creature designer Alec Gillis. Topics include the script’s seven rewrites, the arduous location scouting, and the design team’s efforts to not make the graboid’s look like giant dongs.
Watch the 30-minute deep dive below.
The Tremors franchise welcomes its seventh film later this month with Tremors: Shrieker Island, which finds Gross’ gun-happy Gummer taking on a rich playboy who wants to hunt graboids on his island resort. A few years back, Bacon tried to launch a Tremors TV, but it sadly didn’t make it past the pilot stage.
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21 Comments
God I love that movie. That’s it. That’s the comment.
Hell yeah. Bacon and Fred Ward made an underappreciated pair. And I particularly loved Michael Gross playing a character waaaay on the other side of Steven Keaton. Such a fun movie.
I’ve always appreciated Bacon but that movie was my first introduction to Fred Ward (I was born in 1980). My appreciation grew further with The Right Stuff, of course, when I finally saw that years later.
He’s also really good in Escape from Alcatraz.
Miami Blues (also with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Skinny Alex Baldwin) is huge fun if you haven’t seen it.
That scene where Fred Ward “accidentally bumps into” Jennifer Jason Leigh at the grocery store and invites himself over for dinner is just fantastic. I stuck through the second season of True Detective praying they would give him more.We’ll always have Remo Williams.And Timerider.
My mom showed me Remo Williams. That was a weird Fred Ward movie
Your the first person I know to spell “awesome” w-e-i-r-d.
I have an autographed picture of him from the HBO movie Cast a Deadly Spell.
This! Bacon and Ward worked so damned well off each other. The bigger loss of it not doing well in theaters is the fact the no one thought to keep pairing them up.
It’s so, so good.
I rewatched it a couple months ago. Totally stands up. Not many movies from 30 years ago (god that makes me feel old) can say the same. It’s the rare genre film (well, dual-genre horror/buddy comedy mashup) that started with interesting characters and built up from there. I wish more Hollywood films took the same approach.
My 2 middle schoolers loved it during Quarantine Home Theater this springMelvin on the hut, “No way, man!” Actually emotional moment, still freaks me out
I had no idea that Tremors was a flop. Growing up, it was a frequent broadcast on weekend afternoons along with non-flops like Robocop (I didn’t have cable growing up, so I was limited in my viewing options). I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I rented it in the mid ‘90s in order to see the full unabridged film, but it’s a fun enough movie that it seems like it should have been a hit. Especially since it got, as the article points out, a bunch of sequels.Also, there was a Tremors TV show that got past the pilot stage, though it only made it a single season on SyFy (which may have still been called ‘The SciFi Channel’) back in the early ‘oos.
Tremors: one of those movies that I find so fun, that I never get tired of watching it.
I remember one year, Tremors was on every movie channel I had at least once a day. Like it would be on HBO for a few months on the different HBO Channels. Then it would be on Starz/Encore and it would be on those channels at least once a day.
That’s definitely how I was introduced to it. The trailer made it look straight-up terrible IIRC and I had no interest in seeing it, and I couldn’t believe how much fun it turned out to be. Reba McEntire as Gross’ equally gun-nut wife? Hell yeah!ETA: I laughed my ass off that Gross had an elephant gun behind glass in his basement, in a “break glass in case of emergency” kind of way.
I watched Tremors 2 first on my local station and wondered what the movie was called. It wasn’t until later after seeing the first Tremors that they were connected.The second not as good as the first, but it still has Fred Ward. The third one was a real step down, but at least it was nice seeing the Perfection townspeople back.And the whole bunker sequence is great, except for that one shot that is clearly Burt shooting a green screen. I love the movies creativity. They always found a way to have a tentacle get sliced because the crew only had one Graboid to shoot.
I don’t think I’ve seen Tremors since it came out on VHS. I remember being very freaked out by it as a kid.
I’m guessing it’s some guy’s name. Some guy named Graboid.I’ll assume Tremors remains perfectly pleasant background noise while you do something else, like it has for the past 30 years.
I finally watched this documentary last night. All the way through, I was wondering why the actress who played Rhonda wasn’t featured. Rhonda was always my favorite character in that movie – she was a smart female character when that was a pretty rare species.So I went down the Finn Carter rabbit hole, and oh no. Things did not go well for her. Now I feel bad.