Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell
starring Michael Gross, Jamie Kennedy, Tanya van Graan and Jamie-Lee Money
screenplay by John Whelpley
directed by Don Michael Paul
Rating: ♦◊◊◊◊
This is the most recent instalment of the Tremors movie franchise. I enjoyed the first movie, Tremors (1990, directed by Ron Underwood, starring Keven Bacon, Fred Ward and Michael Gross). It was weird, quirky and clever. But all the others since then have been incrementally poorer attempts to cash in on that initial success. The Graboid monster has always been a desert creature. But in A Cold Day in Hell the monster is transplanted to the Canadian Arctic Nunavut Territory, which is incorrectly called “Nunavut Province” twice in the movie. Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) is a comical, hard-core federal government conspiracist, gun-crazy survivalist. Michael Gross plays him great. (I first saw Michael Gross playing Steven Keaton, the father of the family on the TV sit-com Family Ties [1982-89], co-starring Michael J. Fox. I really liked that show.) Wherever he travels to battle Graboids Burt has to take his guns with him. I’m glad to see that the screenwriters included a line about Burt having to fill out RCMP paperwork in order to travel to Canada with his firearms.
The film starts out with a nod to global warming. Researchers are drilling ice cores in an unusually warm Arctic when they disturb and awaken Graboids under the ice. Once they realize what it is they have to call Burt Gummer in his off-the-grid American desert hideaway - Perfection, Nevada - and coax him up there. Burt is skeptical because he knows the Graboid only as a dessert animal.
Not once is the story anything but boring. Burt Gummer is the sole constant in all the films, and Michael Gross’s character (not the monster) has become the propellant to the story. He’s funny. He’s ridiculous. He’s Burt. The monster itself keeps evolving new features with each episode, much like Ridley Scott’s Alien has done in that franchise. That’s why I call Burt the propellant of the story. He’s the main unifying feature. The monster keeps changing, but Burt is always Burt. The Graboid monster is not an alien predator, like the Ridley Scott’s Alien. I credit the screenwriters for making the Graboid an entirely terrestrial monster, a living fossil, a remnant from the dinosaur age, hibernating under ground and periodically being roused by unwitting humans.
I’m not overly interested in seeing any more Tremors movies. Or Alien movies either, for all that.