Tremors

Year: 1990

Country: USA

Tagline: The monster movie that breaks new ground.  »

Plot: Valentine "Val" McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) are two good-for-nothing odd-job workers. They usually mend fences and railings, help farmers in a sleepy town called Perfection, and take care of cows. They have the use of a down-trodden truck, and not much money to their names. The live near a dry dusty town, and are friends with most of the villagers. Perfection occupies a small part of dried-out Perfection Valley, surrounded by small mountains, except for a county road.Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), is a university student which investigates earthquakes. She tells them that she's getting weird signs from their seismographs, but there were no earthquakes around. Val likes her, but prefers daydreaming about some playmate, so he doesn't ask the seismologist out .The two friends Earl and Val are attacked by a kind of snake which appears from below the dusty soil. Also, they find the town drunkyard on the top of a electricity post, dead. They start wondering whether he was so afraid of something that he preferred dying up there of thirst. They try to warn some of their isolated neighbours, and they find an earthed car with its lights on and music from the radio still blasting.The two friends go to the town drugstore to tell everyone. First, they try to leave by truck. However, the road is blocked because the snakes attacked some road building workers (John Goodwin & John Pappas) and ate them. Val and Earl's pickup truck almost gets stuck at the place of the rock avalanche, but Val finally manages to release it and drive away. The two friends come back to the village to tell the villagers who are waiting for them at the local convenience store. Back in Perfection, they find a huge snake grabbing at the lows of their truck. The shopkeeper, mean Walter Chang (Victor Wong), lends them two horses so they can go and tell the county police, because all phone lines are cut, and there is no mobile phone network coverage on the area. Several people are not worried at all in spite of everything that's going on: dumb teenager Melvin Plug (Robert Jayne) mocks them, Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire) have built themselves a nuclear refuge and crammed it with heavy weaponry, so they don't feel they need to have fear of anything.Val and Earl ride for dear life. But their horses are bitten by some of the snakes. They run away on foot, but the creature runs after them. They would have been caught but for the creature hitting itself against a huge concrete wall to death. At that moment, the seismologist shows up again. They discover that the creature stinks horribly, is several metres long, and that the snakes were a kind of tentacles protruding from its mouth. Rhonda checks her seismographs, learning that there must be at least three more of those snake-mouthed monsters.When the three are going back to Perfection another of the creatures tries to capture them. They can only see a trail of dust flying as the monster swims invisible through the soft soil of the valley. This dust trail is going to be the sign that a critter is moving underground from now on. Val, Earl and Rhonda run for dear life and end up up to some tall rocks where the creatures cannot climb. They stay there, but the creatures are very patient. Finally, Rhonda devises a plan hey manage to climb from one rock to the other and to jumpinto their van, being closely followed by the meat-hunger monsters. They deduce that creatures feel them because they can make sense of the noise humans make in the form of vibrations.Back to the drugstore, Walter decides to call the monsters graboids. Melvin is still mocking Earl and Val stupidly, but Val has to risk her life to save Mindy Sterngood (Ariana Richards), who had been hopping around with her headphones on, not listening to her mother Nancy (Charlotte Stewart)'s cries. When they think they have outwitted the graboids by taking refuge atop the roofs of buildings, the graboids destroy the buildings' foundations. The buildings are simple and fragile, completely made of planks of wood. A graboid manages to eat Walter, emerging from under the cheap wooden shopfloor. Another graboid eats Nestor (Richard Marcus), and one of them manages to destroy one of the underground walls of the Gummers, but they fight back with all their weaponry, finally killing the vicious creature.The survivors pick up a bulldozer and they try to run on it. They also go to pick up the Gummers, which have prepared many weapons. The graboids are highly intelligent, and they prepare a trap for the humans, which succeeds. They all have to run to some rocks. They wait there, surrounded by the graboids.They think of another plan. They throw dynamite to the animals, who swallow everything but are afraid of strong noises, which hurt their sensitive sense. The dynamite explodes within one of the critters, killing it. They try the same trick with the other graboid, but the remaining critter spits out the dynamite, and they have to run away from their safe hiding place. Val is on the open earth, so he is going to be detected and eaten by the surviving graboid. He decides to run, but the graboid is very fast. When Val is about to jump from a high cliff, he steps aside, but the graboid can't stop because of the distraction of their last dynamite blast, and falls from the cliff onto the void.They are happily alive, and Earl coaxes Val into asking Rhonda out. Val tries to fight it, because Rhonda is a university student with a brilliant future in front of her, and he has no prospects. Earl tells him that it's her who has to take a decision like that.The final scene shows some loose dirt moving on the dry soil of the valley, proving that there is at least one more ravenous creature alive.The event happens in a small town which gradually becomes aim of a strange creature. But what is this creature, and where is it? At the same time, a seismologist is working in the area. Trapped in their town, the town-folk have no escape.

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