After the cereal had grown soggy and the orange juice was long gone, the final credits rolled on the morning’s last cartoon. Still, the day was far from over. It was time to roll up my sleeves, grab the remote and surf the metaphorical waves of cable television’s ocean-like pool of churning content.
That’s right: it was Saturday.
Saturday afternoons could mean a great deal of different things. Maybe a friend had stayed the night and the outlook of the weekend was nothing but video games, a carton of Goldfish crackers and more soda than any human being should rightly imbibe. Maybe an extended family get together had been planned months in advance and my parents were dragging me to a place I was relatively unfamiliar with alongside people who fit the same description.
Still, sometimes, when I was lucky, it meant my favorite spot on the couch, some snacks taken sneakily from the pantry and the rectangular, black remote which had been with us so long that many of the white symbols had long before worn off. Luckily, the markings were superfluous as I knew its configuration by heart. Channel up. Channel down. Power. Volume up. And so on. It was second nature.
On such a Saturday, I never knew what I might discover. Perhaps a latter Police Academy sequel or, if I was lucky, something I remember thinking was called The Monty Python Movie, in which grown men argued about coconuts. That was a good one. Of course there was the occasional Godzilla entry and a whole slew of random monsters lurking in the local stations, just waiting for the unsuspecting remote wielder to pause, even for a moment, on their station. The possibilities were endless…
I often found myself avoiding those movies: you know, the scary ones. Sure, like any other kid, there were times I would get sucked in, unable to look away from the creature wreaking havoc onscreen, but, deep down, it unsettled me. Horror meant danger and danger had no place with me on my couch in the middle of a lazy Saturday afternoon.
And, so, when my television came to rest on a station featuring two grown men bickering in a pick-up truck as if they were boys on a playground, I removed my thumb from the channel up button. This sort of conversation felt familiar, safe— almost like I knew these guys. They were funny together. Plus, it already felt more interesting than Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach (1988) which was parked several stations over and, worst case scenario, I could always flip back to it if whatever this was didn’t pan out.
I fell in love with Val and Earl within seconds. The dynamic between them. It felt right out of a classic comedy. The same could be said about the characters which inhabited the small, dusty town of Perfection; each and every one a gem and people I would be more than happy to spend 90 minutes with. Yes, everything was smooth sailing… that is, until they found Edgar.
High up on an electrical pole, sat the tanned body of Edgar Deems. Shortly after the grisly discovery, it’s revealed that he didn’t perish from a heart attack or a freak accident. No, Edgar died of dehydration. Thirst. Nothing was going to get Edgar to budge… and certainly he didn’t arrive at such a resolve for no reason.
There were creatures in the sand. Leviathans of the earth, sailing through the ground as smoothly and quickly as a fish through the ocean’s waves and they were Hellbent on taking out the fine people of Perfection. I had been tricked. Conned into thinking I was watching a comedic matinee, safe in the confines of the genre I so loved to hang out in. I flipped back to Police Academy 5 thinking that would be that.
However, seconds later, I had flipped back. I was watching Val and Earl run at full speed as a mound of earth followed closely behind them. I felt the adrenaline rush as they leapt across the concrete ditch. I shared in their confusion as the thing sat silent after the collision and their excitement upon realizing it was dead. I was hooked.
It was years before I saw the full, uncensored for daytime TV version of Tremors, but it always sat in the back of my head as a fond Saturday afternoon viewing. It takes a special sort of film to bridge the gap in the mind of a kid who thinks they want nothing to do with monsters and yet is inexplicably drawn to them, but that’s exactly what S.S Wilson and Brent Maddock delivered with their script. It’s blunt, plainly worded and hilariously haphazard, presenting a believable, relatable world populated by characters to match, allowing the creatures to feel legitimized and still be appropriately larger-than-life.
Under the direction of Ron Underwood, the film executes on the script with incredible aptitude and a tonality that matches the words on the page beat for beat. Many scenes embody the balance of the fear, comedy, sense of adventure and down-to-earth sensibilities of the characters, but none stand out to me in the same way as that where Val and Earl first meet a Graboid in all its glory. The scene is exciting and dangerous, while funny and slapdash, all built around fantastic creature effects work which drives the whole movie forward.
It was the scene that got me to finally put down the remote and although Police Academy 5 ultimately paid the price, I think I made the right call.
THE SCENE
Val and Earl ride away from the doctor’s farm, terrified of the creatures that surely lurk nearby. Their horses stop short. Earl is thrown from his horse and Val dismounts to help. A Graboid emerges from the ground and its snakelike tentacles feast on Earl’s horse. Realizing the creature is coming from under the ground, Val fires his rifle at one of the tentacles. They retreat, only to emerge once more, revealing themselves to be part of a larger whole. Val and Earl run. The monster chases, tearing down fence posts and gaining on them. They come across a large concrete ditch and attempt to jump it. They fail. The Graboid collides with the concrete, one of its tentacles emerging limply from the cracked bulge it creates in its surface. Realizing the creature is dead, Val and Earl celebrate, only to be startled by the confused voice of Rhonda, attempting to figure out where the seismic tremors she had registered had come from.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
The scene and the script open in an identical fashion:
Val and Earl are riding at full gallop. They race alongside a concrete-lined flood-control ditch and veer off to follow a barbed wire fence which crosses the ditch.
The wide shot depicting this sweeps over the desert landscape, providing a sense of geography for the blocking of the scene as well as the impressive breadth of the environment in general. The scene continues in a series of wide and medium-wide shots as the two ride onward, their dialogue occurring overlaid and as scripted. The camera moves with them as they ride, creating urgency and motivation that extends beyond the characters’ actions and permeates the cinematography.
The sweeping wide shots falter just as the horses do, the camera cutting to close-ups in quick succession when Suddenly the horses stop short. The camera tracks upward, looking down on Val and Earl as they fight to control their horses. As they had leading up to this point, the visuals continue to hint at what’s to come from below. Val and Earl’s incredulous reactions keep them grounded too, allowing for the humor to fall away for a moment while the tension skyrockets.
A wide shot signifies a second of calm once more, leaning on the landscape to create a sense of visual and emotional perspective (a consistent visual motif in the film) and then jumps back to close-ups as Earl and Val fall from their horses. The script deviates slightly from this, reading, Val wheels around wildly, dismounts and runs to Earl. The film shows Earl and Val toppling off of their respective mounts in the same shot. This serves to further a vaudevillian sense of practical coordination and symmetry that runs through the scene and, indeed, the film at large.
The shot grows tighter as Val and Earl crawl toward one another, breaking away only to show the horse in the grip of the snake-like tentacles seen earlier in the film. In the script:
Their eyes bulge. Several “snake things” have engulfed the horse’s head, sucking, crushing, slurping.
In the film, the image cuts between the scrambling men and the quick, ruthless work of the “snake things” described on the page. They’re thick, almost Anaconda-like red and black creatures with mouthfuls of teeth and long, red tongues. The ferocious noises they make seem to be a combination of the description on the page and which serves to a frightening effect as their sucking, slurping, screeching howls sound altogether otherworldly.
Again the image cuts to a close up of Val, tracking his narrowed eye realization as he voices what has then become so painfully obvious: That’s how they get you! They’re under the ground! The script takes a step back here, providing insight into Val and Earl’s states of mind.
Suddenly they realize what that means — the things could come up under them!!
The stream-of-conscious style of prose utilized here, coupled with the similar vernacular to the film’s protagonists amounts to a fantastic situation that feels incredibly grounded in reality. Val and Earl come across as two normal guys who just happened to stumble into something as far away from normal as it gets. While they may be slow to realize the nature of the beasts they’re facing or the repercussions of their decisions in the moment, when they get there, it hits them like a ton of bricks— as evidenced by the underlined them and use of not one, but two, apostrophes.
The film speeds this whole section of the screenplay up, condensing the dialogue into a few seconds of screen time and doing away with a brief scramble when the two first realize where the creature resides. A close up depicts Val as he raises his rifle and shoots. The edit answers the previous shot with a close up on one of the snake things taking a bullet through its thick body. Just as scripted, orange goo spurts out. The thing snarls and slides back into the sand in seconds, leaving the image to land on Val and Earl once more.
Their incredulous looks don’t hold the frame for very long as the image moves to a close up of the dirt below them slowly rising. As written, in all caps no less, Then — A HUGE MOUND OF EARTH RISES UP UNDER VAL AND EARL!! The camera tracks the progression of this “MOUND” first from their feet, then straight on and finally from a high angle wide shot of the crack spreading across the ground. The wide shot again reminds the viewer of the expansive space and the smallness of the people which occupy and believe they control it. This sensibility culminates in a medium shot of Val and Earl as Val shouts with disbelief, “There must be a million of them!!” That’s when the image cuts to a wide shot of the earth exploding upwards as a huge, single armored head emerges roaring from the sand.
Earl responds in a voice steeped in obviousness, but not cruelly so, “Nope… just one.” Val stands beside him, dumbfounded and aghast. The next image is the creature, once more on full display.
The monster is a horrendous thirty-foot long eating machine! Its head is eyeless, utterly alien, covered with tough boney plates which close together to forma cork-screw point.
The thing looks like it is made out of stone, a shielded earthworm that could take on a dinosaur, the snakes protruding from its mouth moving independently of one another, each seeming to have an insatiable hunger all its own. The script describes them as not snake things at all but actually the horrid hook-tentacles that can shoot out six feet to snag their prey! Val and Earl’s reaction in the following shot is one of unhinged terror, reflecting the ludicrousness and utter hopelessness of their predicament. They run and the image again cuts back to the thing from the sand, fully above ground, its spiky back twitching while it opens and closes its dusty beak hungrily.
What follows is a series of fast cuts, depicting the terrified men as they attempt to outrun the creature below them. Again, the camera moves both with them and the creature, even offering a below-ground POV of the thing making its way speedily through the dirt. Val’s hat falls off and fence posts are torn from the ground as the mound chases after its prey. The movement of the creature makes it feel uniquely frightening as never has a monster underground moved through the earth like a whale through water.
As the scene progresses, the script continues to adopt more of the personality of the characters it concerns. Once Val comments “It’s gaining on us!!”, the script practically answers him in the action description with, And as if that weren’t enough, Earl points to more trouble ahead. The experience of reading the screenplay grows more visceral, emotional and flat-out entertaining as the action comes to a head, lending itself to its eventual visual interpretation.
Val points to the ditch, an eight foot wide gap yawning dead ahead. The shot cuts to a POV of the running men, the cement basin fast approaching. The intercutting of quick moving images and close ups of the men, the mound of earth in pursuit and the cement conclusion to the chase continues to intensify, driving all of the elements involved to their inevitable convergence. As the script aptly reminds the reader, They’ll have to jump!
Val and Earl take the ditch at a leap from a low angle. That’s followed by a POV shot as the two near the other end of the ditch. Finally, with a straight on shot of the two as they strike the other side, Val and Earl grasp desperately to the outer lip of the cement as they hang and, failing that, fall into its center. Or, as the screenplay puts it, They leap and — they don’t do it!! Once more, the timing and visual execution of Val and Earl’s ultimate failure in the face of certain doom is composed with a certain Vaudevillian charm that makes the characters feel simultaneously larger than life and yet relatably inadequate.
A few pathetic attempts to escape pass in the seconds before the mound collides with the concrete, a close up shot interrupting their scrambling, depicting the cement basin buckling against the mass of the creature that rammed into it. It cracks outward and then lies still. The image cuts back to Earl and Val, visibly terrified but confused as they don’t appear to be in immediate danger. A tentacle emerges from the cracked cement, falling limply to the side and dangling lifelessly, leaking the same orange goo as when Val shot one before.
Earl comments that it “knocked itself cold.” However, Val responds in kind, saying, “Cold my ass! It’s dead! We killed it!” His shocked disbelief transitions to a sense of empowerment, Val’s simple nature allowing him to transform his narrow, accidental escape into a battle against evil from which he has emerged victorious. The close up holds as he again repeats, “We killed it.” The image showcases the tentacle once more, leaking blood onto the rock. The image returns to Val who jumps and points excitedly at the monster, shouting an excitable and elongated, “fuuuuuuuuuck you!!” He bursts into laughter, cackling at the dead thing before him.
The moment speaks as much to Val’s desire to be accepted, celebrated and successful as it does to his penchant for rolling with the punches, setting the stage for his characters’ arc for the remainder of the film. Earl is along for the ride, more grateful than prideful, but in it until the end with his counterpart. The dynamic between them is rarely as palpably bonded or transparent as it is in the moments when they face the underground creature in the concrete trench.
Still, the moment passes quickly as pebbles rattle loudly down the concrete wall behind them. Both jump, terrified, as the camera pans up to find Rhonda. They respond with annoyance and slight disdain, ignoring her question of “what’s going on?” and merely drawing her attention to the bleeding tentacle hanging from the broken bulge in the cement behind them.
Rhonda’s follow up question, “what’s that?” is the thesis query for the remainder of the film and one Val and Earl appear very much uninterested in.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“Whenever we’re designing a creature, even if it’s some kind of fantastic monster, we really like to go to research books of real animals… details like skin texture, coloring, even the way the animal moves so it has some sort of basis in reality,” Tom Woodruff Jr reflected in “The Making of Tremors” feature found on the Tremors blu-ray, “If there’s no reality, if it’s all completely made up… there’s sort of an unreal quality to it that’s hard to get over.”
| Saturday afternoons held the potential for a great many things when I was a kid, but when I think back on the best ones, the best discoveries, I think of Val and Earl and their accidental triumph over the Graboid that nearly took ‘em out. I think of the type of fantastic entertainment that still managed to be grounded in the real. |
Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson wrote a script infused with conversational wit and visual flare that translated beautifully to the screen. Under Ron Underwood’s guidance and with the effects work of Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr, the words came roaring to life. According to the previously mentioned documentary, hand puppets, hydraulic scale creatures, miniatures and mechanical versions of the snake tentacles all had to be created and used in tandem to bring to life the sequences onscreen. Sometimes a few seconds of film could take multiple days to prepare and shoot.
Beyond creatures, Alec Gillis recalls how mature sets had to be created to shoot several of the Graboid scenes. The desert had to be meticulously recreated as a miniature and often small set pieces within them could take weeks to prepare individually.
However, it’s the characters, Val and Earl, that breathe life into the film. Their simple, matter-of-fact, comedically alert yet hopeless foolhardiness drives the narrative and is exemplified in the scene where they first face off against the full force of the creatures in Perfection. There’s a timelessness to their shared deficiencies and missteps, a theatrical affectation to their trials. Having grown up loving comedy, these two sucked me in and every other element onscreen became that much more interesting as a result.
I may have spent a lot of time channel surfing as a kid, it’s true. Hell, if you could only see my old remote… hardly a readable button on it! And while the best it often got me was the censored TV version of some movie I was too young to probably appreciate, it did introduce me to a great deal of cinema I doubt I ever would have discovered otherwise.
I can’t think of a scene that better represents everything I loved about the movie, it’s raw realism, the monsters and the dynamic shared between Val and Earl, than the one in the desert as the two made their escape from the monster underground. Fear, humor and an odd sense of whimsy combining to make something… fun. The sort of thing that justified channel surfing in the first place.
I think Ron Underwood put it best when he was describing the town of Perfection in the aforementioned documentary: “rundown, seen better days… [but] it was kind of a romantic place.” If that doesn’t describe the film’s charm, then I don’t know what does. Like those Saturdays themselves, the movie has a romantic quality to it and I’ve never been happier I chose that over the endless bevy of churning content awash in the sea of cable’s waves.
Sorry Police Academy 5, I’ll take Perfection over Miami Beach any day, “snake things” included.
Tremors (1990): Written by Brent Maddock & S.S. Wilson & Directed by Ron Underwood
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