Let me make a little confession: I like multi-film box sets, and I like them cheap. I'm not the sort of person who really cares about special features or commentary tracks or especially nice packaging when it comes to a DVD. They're nice if they are available, but I've not watched a single one of the bonus features on something like 90% of my DVD collection, and as far as packaging goes I just want something which doesn't look horrible and won't take up too much space on my shelves. All I want from a DVD of a film is a reasonable picture and sound quality, a more or less complete cut of the film, and content that's enjoyable, either through being good or being so-bad-it's-good. This being the case, I'm currently living in what for me is a golden age of DVD collecting; multi-film sets are coming out all the time, most of the stores are cutting their prices so that they're a good way of collecting a lot of films for your money, and the discs used in such collections are often the same ones that are offered in the individual packages or the more fancy box sets anyway.

The absolute best sets, for the me, are the ones where the films are in little individual slipcases that are like slimline versions of normal DVD cases, with pretty much exactly the same artwork but about half the thickness. They look good on the shelf, and the second-hand DVD store down the street is willing to buy the individual ones second-hand, so if I like half the films and don't like the other half I can sell on the ones I don't want and in the long run I still save money on the ones I want to keep. The next best sets, to my mind, are the ones which offer several films in a series in a package no larger than a standard-sized DVD case, so even if I only want to keep hold of one or two of the films it's not taking up more space than a single DVD would. The three-disc set of the first three Tremors movies falls in the latter category. It's not the prettiest of packages. But if the films are any good, it will serve my purposes nicely.

Tremors

Somewhat irritatingly, the version presented in this set of the original Tremors is not - despite what the packaging says - presented in anamorphic widescreen. This means that if you watch it on a widescreen TV the picture won't expand to fit the screen - as likely as not, you'll end up with irritating black bands surrounding the picture. My TV, at least, had a zoom function which let me somewhat alleviate this, but there's no getting around the fact that the picture quality on this so-called "Collector's Edition" disc of the film simply isn't quite as good as it could be.

This is a shame, because Tremors deserves better than this. It is, in most respects, yet another monster movie cleaving to the old formula that's been a cliche since the 1950s, but it's an excellent example of the subgenre; aware that modern audiences are going to find monster movie conventions difficult to take seriously, it embraces this and plays the situation for laughs more than scares - though it's got more than a few of the latter - and it helps that the script is smart enough to make the best possible use of the film's premise.

That premise is fairly simple. Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) are two handymen working odd jobs in the tiny rural community of Perfection, Nevada. Tired of the limited opportunities available to them in the town, they agree that it's time to move on to greener pastures; however, before they get around to leaving the valley, they stumble across signs that someone - or something - is killing townsfolk. As it transpires, the culprits are a number of giant, burrowing worm-like creatures with mouthfuls of biting, grabbing tentacles, which hunt their prey. Soon enough the creatures - dubbed "Graboids" by the townsfolk have knocked over the phone lines, caused a landslide that takes out the only road out of town, and started to feast on the trapped occupants. Soon enough, Valentine, Earl, and the rest of the survivors find themselves struggling to defend themselves against the subterranean onslaught.

The film succeeds mainly by doing everything right. The early scenes introduce us to Valentine, Earl, and the excellent cast of supporting characters, of whom the standouts have to be Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire), a couple of middle-aged gun nut survivalists who moved to Perfection to prepare for World War III. (Other notable cast members include Victor Wong as general store owner Walter Chang and Finn Carter as convenient seismologist Rhonda LeBeck). Director Ron Underwood does not waste too much time on these scenes, however, and soon begins piling on the tension, as stranger and stranger incidents begin to pile up. Having dreamed up their seismic serpents, the writers do a fantastic job of coming up with scenes that introduce their capabilities and play on them throughout the film - from the eerie discovery of a man who has died of thirst, having spent 2 days taking shelter from the Graboids up an electricity pylon, to the first scene in which their gargantuan size is revealed, to the climax as the bomb-tossing townsfolk try to escape the final worms, there isn't a single wasted scene; after the early scenes establishing their capabilities, there isn't a single sequence which doesn't come up with a new and interesting way to exploit them. Though highly adaptable - and occasionally eerily smart - the Graboids don't respond to new tactics on the part of the humans by suddenly manifesting a brand new ability out of nowhere, but by using their existing capabilities in new ways. And this forces the human characters to continually adapt to come up with new means of escaping from - and fighting - their burrowing tormentors.

The end result is a film which never repeats itself. And that's what makes it so good. The downfall of so many sub-standard monster movies is exhaustion of the concept; when the screenwriters just can't think of anything new the monsters can do, or a new way for the human beings to interact with the monsters, which are consistent with the abilities and characteristics the monsters have been established as possessing. The very laziest scriptwriters spawn new abilities for the creatures which have no precedent, but what more frequently happens is that writers resort to simply rehashing the same situations we've seen previously. This is part of the reason why the later Alien sequels (and the Alien vs Predator films) simply don't match up to the first two: Ridley Scott covered most of the territory you'd want to cover with a solitary xenomorph in the first film. John Carpenter James Cameron took the obvious step of having loads of aliens, which revitalised the concept a bit, but by the time Joss Whedon was cranking out Alien Resurrection there wasn't really much more you could do with the concept in a feature-length film.

This is the trap that Tremors avoids. It helps that, as well as applying the monster movie formula in a competent and non-repetitive way, the film has an interesting cast and a decent sense of humour, but what really makes it work is the skill of the writers in coming up with many and diverse means of tackling the premise, and who know to stop before they run out of ideas, and it's this tight script (written by Brent Maddock and SS Wilson) and equally tight direction (by Ron Underwood) which sold me on the film and let me overlook some of the more shaky aspects of the production, like the fact that the monsters' mouth-tentacles are very obviously glove puppets in some scenes. It's definitely a B-movie, but it's a B-movie that others in the genre would be well-advised to imitate.

Tremors 2: Aftershocks

Tremors 2 - which this time is presented in the promised anamorphic widescreen - sees the return of Fred Ward and Michael Gross's characters from the first film (Kevin Bacon presumably being beyond the sequel's budget). After opening with a brief scene with a Mexican oil worker falling prey to the tunnelling terrors in order to remind the audience of how the monsters operate - they burrow underground, they follow seismic tremors to hunt you down, you can evade them for a while if you keep off the ground - writers Maddock and Wilson leap right in and bring us up to date with what's happening with Earl, who's working on an ostrich farm (Wilson, incidentally, would direct this one as well as writing it, Ron Underwood having not returned to direct this time). The owner of the Mexican oil field that the Graboids have settled in would wants Earl's help to get rid of them - Kevin Bacon's character apparently already refused. Earl initially refuses, but is convinced by three things: a $50,000 bounty for each Graboid killed, plenty of resources from the Mexican army, and incessant pestering from the oilfield owner's assistant - Grady Hoover (Christopher Gartin), a young man who's idolised Val and Earl ever since the original Tremors incident was covered in the national news.

Grady Hoover, by the way, is an intensely annoying character. He loses to Earl at rock-paper-scissors because apparently he doesn't know what that is, which just strikes me as deeply strange - surely everyone knows rock-paper-scissors? Surely it's not just an obscure practice of the rural South? Maybe we're meant to understand that Hoover is dorky and unworldly, but not knowing rock-paper-scissors seems to take him beyond unworldly and into "lived in a sealed box all his life" territory. The other major character we are introduced to is Kate Reilly (Helen Shaver), the oilfield's geologist. Having seen the first film, we're obviously meant to assume she's going to be Earl's love interest, just as another geology department veteran was Val's love interest in the first film. This suspicion is proven with a shot of Kate's denim-clad butt as Earl checks her out. I rolled my eyes a bit, but then they gave us a shot of Earl's denim-clad butt as Kate checked him out, which more or less sold me on what the director was trying to do; as far as subversions of the usual way horror films objectify female leads go, it's gentle and a bit obvious but it works for me. Unfortunately, they couldn't think of anything to do with this character, so unlike Finn Carter's character from the first film she spends the entire film sitting around at home base doing unproductive lab work until the monsters attack the base. Then she runs around screaming and crying and generally doing the monster movie weepy helpless heroine thing. So, good job to the writers for undermining the usual treatment of women in monster movies, but a slap on the wrist for then immediately reinforcing it.

In general, the script isn't quite as tight as the first one when it comes to the dialogue, which is odd considering that we're dealing with the same scriptwriters as the first film. Part of this is due to the insufferable Grady Hoover, every one of whose lines make me wish the writers would hurry up and kill him, but there's no denying that the writing just isn't as polished and funny as the previous film's. Although the writers do a decent job of considering how Earl and Grady might go about Graboid-hunting given decent funding and resources and foreknowledge of what they are and how they work - for example, they plant seismographs about the oil field and have them transmit to a computer on the hunters' truck, which lets them track the movement of the Graboids around the oil field. In terms of the actual action, too, the writing and direction is a little flabbier. Grady and Earl's initial plan of using remote control cars with bombs on to blow up the Graboids works far longer than it would have done in the original film, in which the worms learned pretty quickly when the humans were up to sneaky tricks; as it us, there's far too much time spent showing the characters using exactly the same technique for dealing with the creatures, leading to precisely the same problems of repetition that the first film so adeptly avoided. There's also too many scenes where Earl and Grady are talking about what they're going to do with all their money, or Earl and Burt talking about what's been going on in their lives. And the action scenes seem just a little... off. Maybe it's the fact that the music choices for several of them seem to lack tension. Maybe it's the fact that they drag out just a little too long. Maybe it's the lack of enthusiasm I feel from the actors; all of the participants in Tremors seemed to be really into it, whereas in Aftershocks nobody seems to care very much.

Another mistake the writers make is delving too deeply into the origins of the Graboids. One of the charms of the original film was that it honestly didn't matter where the Graboids came from - it just wasn't relevant to the situation, and wasn't really something any of the characters were in a position to investigate. Speculations about pre-Cambrian origins of the Graboids add nothing to the film other than more padding that the film really, really doesn't need. Things pick up a little when Earl calls up Burt to bring in some of his extra firepower to help out. Burt is easily the most endearing character in the film - from his trophy room, which includes a full-sized Graboid head from the first movie, to the little details the writers introduce (his wife left him after he fell into a deep depression, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union making World War III a dim possibility), as soon as he's introduced I was suddenly more interested in Burt than any of the other characters. He still suffers from the same issues with limp dialogue that the other characters to do, but it's hard not to be charmed as he drives around on his own narrating his Graboid-hunting forays and having the time of his life playing army.

Nonetheless, even Burt isn't enough to get things back on track. Halfway through the film, the writers decide to pull a new ability for the Graboids out of nowhere, having realised that they just can't think of anything new to do with the whole seismic tunnelling terror concept. So, the Graboids burst and hatch out litters of "Shriekers" - tiny mobile screaming little creatures that look like a Graboid mouth attached to a tiny dinosaur butt on legs. They're about the size of a large dog and they run around, scream, and kill people, and they navigate via heat vision (a bit like a low-budget Predator) - the screams give out a lot of heat, which calls more Shriekers to the location. Oh, and once they've eaten enough, they spawn more Shriekers. The main characters run around shooting them and running them over with trucks.

I have a big problem with the way the writers handle this transformation - mainly, I'm annoyed that they wait until the film is half over to do it. I could accept it as an evolution of the concept, or as a means of shaking things up in order to make a sequel about the Shriekers, if it happened at a comparatively early stage, but the fact that they give us 50 minutes of limp Graboid action before introducing the Shriekers makes it look like they ran out of ideas halfway through. Once the characters work out how the Shriekers navigate by heat, they do at least partially come up with interesting means of evading them which tie into the heat concept, but having hit on a good idea they too often abandon it - pointlessly, and stupidly - and get into trouble as a result. And the means of dealing with the Shriekers mostly boil down to hitting them or shooting them, whereas in the first film each Graboid died in a unique manner.

What's more, the Shriekers seem to be a deviation from the writers' attempt to be consistent with their treatment of what the Graboids are and how they operate. The Shriekers reproduce by spawning more Shriekers directly once they have eaten sufficient surplus biomass to produce one. Where, precisely, is the place for the Graboids in this life cycle? I'm not demanding a rigorous treatment of their biological life cycle and their place in the ecosystem, but it seems to me that the secret of writing a good monster movie is making sure the monsters seem to be doing what they do for a reason which doesn't boil down to "It doesn't make any sense in-character for the monsters to do this, but we need them to do it for the sake of the plot". The transformation of the Graboids into Shriekers falls far short of this standard.

I suppose I shouldn't have expected too much of a film called Aftershocks - after all, by definition aftershocks are weaker than the main shock. But there's no excuse for such a catastrophic decline in the standard of writing from the writers of the original Tremors. Maybe it's the loss of Kevin Bacon and his onscreen interactions with Fred Ward, maybe it's the fact that Ron Underwood is no longer directing, or maybe it's the lack of the large ensemble cast of the original, but something is just plain missing from this incarnation of the series.

Tremors 3: Back to Perfection

Still written by the same team as the first two films, Tremors 3 sees SS Wilson stick to writing whilst his cowriter Brent Maddock takes the director's chair. We open with Burt, more or less the sole returning character from Aftershocks and still played by Michael Gross, on a Shrieker-exterminating mission to Argentina. Making Burt the main protagonist of the series is a decidedly smart move. He was far and away the most interesting character in the second film, a real highlight of the first, and his survivalist attitude is a nice fit for the series' general theme of adaptation - Burt (and the other characters) can prepare as much as they like for the Graboids and the Shriekers, but they adapt too, and they'll always come up with a new way to surprise their human prey.

After a suitably gun-happy opening we see Burt coming home to the town of Perfection, setting of the original film, which is another good move; the lack of a sufficiently interesting ensemble cast and an endearing setting hurt Tremors 2 severely. The new characters introduced are also infinitely more fun than the cast of Tremors 2 - including Jodi (Susan Chuang), commercially-savvy niece of the deceased general store owner from the first film, who's turned his store into a Graboid-themed tourist trap, and "Desert" Jack Sawyer (Shawn Christian), who runs an obnoxiously fake "Graboid Safari". A number of other returning characters (played by their original actors) from the first film who were absent from Aftershocks round out the cast nicely. Within the first twenty minutes of the film we've already had better characterisation and better scenes than the entirety of the second film, and the monsters aren't even especially active by that point. And, it's at around that point that the Graboids (with marginally improved but still heartwarmingly cheesy special effects - I love the fact that the mouth-tentacles are still glove puppets) make their appearance and start feasting on people again. The first major Graboid attack is familiar territory for the series but saves itself from being a rote repetition by the inclusion of an unpredictable and disorientated party of tourists.

The townsfolk themselves, of course, have been here before, so they aren't as lost and confused as in the last film, and thanks to Burt's contingency plans they're able to quickly put together a Graboid-hunting expedition - but right when they're about to head off, the Feds show up and take over the situation; their plan is to trap the Graboid the study (it's an endangered species after all), and if that doesn't work they'll evacuate the town altogether. Naturally, the townsfolk aren't thrilled by the idea - Jack can't operate his safari if there are actual live Graboids running around, Jodi's business plan depends on their proximity to the valley, and Burt just plain doesn't trust the government - and when Melvin Plug (Robert Jayne), the annoying kid from the first movie who grew up to become a predatory land developer, turns up to protect his investment, things become even more complicated. In fact, just as Tremors 2 presented a cast and a situation which I felt was rather oversimplified and lacking in the personal interactions of the first film, Tremors 3 seems if anything to be overcomplex - between the tourists, Feds, and property developers, the writers have packed in more details than they can really fully engage with in the film. Hence, the tourists are evacuated as soon as the Graboids show up, and the Feds are all wiped out when the Graboids metamorphose into herds of Shriekers halfway through. The rest of the film focuses on the townsfolk's efforts to wipe out the Shrieker herd, complicated by the presence of El Blanco - an albino, sterile Graboid which, because it's a mutant, didn't break down into Shriekers like the others.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Tremors sequel without introducing an even more nonsensical stage in the Graboid life cycle. In this case, we are introduced to the Ass-Blasters, matured Shriekers who can propel themselves into the air by farting fire and steer using large fins. The CGI for these creatures is even worse than the CGI for the Shriekers in the second film. (Come to mention it, we don't actually see any Shriekers - except in pitch darkness - in this instalment, so maybe they had to save the animation budget for the Ass-Blasters. The Blasters essentially fill the same role as the Shriekers did in Tremors 2, except they can fly, but the fact that they can fly means that retreating to the rooftops isn't an option - which makes staying safe from both them and El Blanco a difficult prospect. The inclusion of the Ass-Blasters is transparently an attempt by the writers to make the humans' contingency plans fall to bits, but at least they do a better job of making the whole Graboid life cycle make sense this time; the Ass-Blasters are Graboid egg-carriers, so the Graboid-Shrieker-Ass-Blaster cycle finally comes full circle.

The film ultimately succeeds at solving the problems of Tremors 2; whilst it isn't quite as good as the original, it is at least far more of a successful followup. The humour doesn't fall flat as it did in the first sequel, the script and the characterisation are better, and the direction has somewhat improved. I wouldn't necessarily have bought it on its own, but I'm glad to have it as part of a set with the first film.

The Bottom Line

This set doesn't provide you with the complete Tremors series - there was also a one-season TV show focused around the town of Perfection, in which Burt and the townsfolk had to deal with living with El Blanco, the unwanted attention the creature brings them, and other monsters and mysterious threats to the town. There was also a Western-themed prequel (starring Michael Gummer, once again, as one of Burt's ancestors). But to be honest, the three films you have here pretty much exhaust the concept. With Tremors 3 bringing the Graboid life cycle full-circle, there's no way for the Graboids to surprise the protagonists - or the audience - so there's no way to keep things interesting unless (as in the prequel) you shift the focus to a bunch of characters who don't know how the creatures behave, and thus can't prepare for them. That, however, won't get past the problem of the audience already knowing how the monsters work, even when the characters don't. The films work on the basis of the characters learning reasonably quickly how the creatures operate and making use of that knowledge, so keeping the humans ignorant can only go so far. And part of the attraction of the series is Burt and the other familiar characters. The TV show had a better idea, shifting the emphasis more towards the townsfolk and their interactions than the monsters themselves, but as far as films go, I honestly can't see where the series can go after this.

I bought this set for £7, which is about right. It's around as much as a single DVD, so if you're interested in Tremors at all and don't mind the lack of anamorphic widescreen on the first disc, the set is a pretty good deal. Treat it as though you're buying the original film - by far the best thing on offer here - and the other two discs are there as a bonus if you really want to see more.