In Defense Of: “Tremors 2: Aftershocks” (1996)

Now, as always, if you’ve either never seen the film or it’s been a while, let’s recap: Years after the events of Tremors, Earl Basset (Fred Ward), living a life without his best friend Val and having wasted the fortune he earned from the publicity surrounding his role in the discovery of Graboids, is hired by a Mexican oil company to help hunt down and kill a number of Graboids responsible for killing workers at their oil field. Along with a taxi driver named Grady (Christopher Gartin), who convinces him to do it for the money, Earl heads south of the border and gets down to business only to find himself overwhelmed by the sheer number of creatures roaming the countryside.

After calling in assistance from Burt Gummer – also down on his luck after being left by his wife and seemingly existing without a sense of real purpose – the trio soon discover a new threat: Shriekers, bipedal monsters that burst out of Graboids and hunt via infrared rather than sound, reproducing each and every time they consume food. Now stuck playing a whole new ballgame, the hunters have to race against the clock to wipe out the Shriekers before they overrun the oil field and escape out into Mexico at large.

Perhaps one of Tremors 2‘s most notable successes is how it overcomes the lack of Kevin Bacon’s Valentine McKee. It’s a pretty big loss for a sequel to lose its primary lead, particularly when the camaraderie between Val and Earl was such a large piece of the original film’s charm, but Tremors 2 manages to surmount the hurdle with grace, pushing Earl to the forefront and giving Ward the chance to play a bitter but lovable hero whose desire for a better life is still relatable. Though Grady’s placement as a stand-in for Val doesn’t work too flawlessly because of how grating he can be early on, it does serve to underscore how listless Earl is without his best friend around, such as when Earl plays rock/paper/scissors with Grady, making his successes by the end of the film all the more rewarding because his second chance feels like a genuine lesson learned.

Even better, bringing back Burt, the original film’s standout supporting character, is a stroke of genius, as Gross is so clearly having a ball playing the survivalist again that it’s no surprise he went on to carry the franchise forward on his own starting with the next film. Some of the best quotes of the entire franchise are given to Burt here, whether it’s his shocked delivery of the line “I am completely out of ammo. That’s never happened to me before” or the hilarious “I feel I was denied critical, need-to-know information” after encountering Shriekers for the first time, and it all works to make him the highlight of the sequel.

Like the first film, Tremors 2 effortlessly straddles the line between taking itself seriously and poking fun at itself and the massive pool of B-movie creature features it lives in. There’s some genuinely good tension here, such as a solid opening that sees a worker at the oil field trying to escape a Graboid or how a stranded Earl and Grady have to cross the desert in the dark to reach a tow truck meant to help them that has inexplicably come to a stop. Even the birthing scene in which the pair discover that a Graboid they thought was simply sick has erupted from the inside out carries with it some weight, as Earl switches into panic mode thanks to having no clue as to what’s going on, particularly when vehicle engines and a radio tower are mysteriously ripped to shreds, making it seem as though the Graboids are screwing with them on purpose.

Even during its tensest moments, the film has its tongue firmly in cheek, part of that goofy, self-aware Tremors charm present throughout the entire franchise, and is loaded with great gags. Earl casually pops open an umbrella during the first explosion of a Graboid. Burt returns to base camp with his truck completely torn apart thanks to a Shrieker attack he was unprepared for. Earl and Grady hear a coyote howling somewhere in the night get eaten by a Graboid. Burt uses a high-powered rifle to kill a Shrieker late in the film, cause for the group to celebrate, only for everyone to discover his bullet ripped through concrete and more and punctured the engine of their escape vehicle. And, of course, there’s the pull back of the camera to reveal a stuffed and mounted Graboid on Burt’s basement wall during his reintroduction, a fitting parallel to the gun wall joke from the first film.