Wednesday, June 22, 2011

TREMORS 4: THE LEGEND BEGINS (2004)

The storyline from Part 3 continued on into the TV series, so Part 4 instead tells about how the Graboids first showed up in Perfection Valley way back in ye olde 1889. Water from a hot spring hatches some old Graboid eggs that have been sitting there for Satan only knows how long.  The new baby Graboids kill 17 miners that are working nearby.  The mine is now effectively closed, so the owner, Hiram Gummer (Michael Gross), travels from Philadelphia to personally see what the hell is going on.  What he finds is a dying town.  Everybody has hightailed it and there's only a small handful of people left.  People that suspiciously look like they could be the distant relatives of the characters from Part 1.

City-slicker Gummer isn't accustomed to the frontier life, but he goes to investigate the silver mine anyway and finds it infested with Graboids! Barely making it back to town alive, he hires the help of a bounty hunter and even buys a wagon full of guns.  He quickly discovers that he really, really likes guns.

I like TREMORS 4. The budget is respectable, there's less CGI than in Part 3 and the awesome full-grown adult animatronic Graboids are back. I also liked the story and enjoyed seeing the origins of Perfection.  The transformation of Gummer from city boy to rough, gun-toting outdoorsman was silly, but funny.  If you like the TREMORS series then this film is a must watch.

Part 1 - Tremors (1990)
Part 2 - Tremors II: Aftershocks (1996)
Part 3 - Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001)
Part 5 - Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015)
Part 6 - Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018)

Part 7 - Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020)