DVD Review: Tremors

This is the first of four Tremors movies and this is just the beginning of what have become family movies for our family. The kids really love the Tremors movies! My daughter and I love them too. I think that we've seen each Tremors movie at least fifteen times and some of them we have watched even more often than that. The kids went around talking about graboids for weeks. They even played graboids with some of their other animal or dinosaur action figures because there are no toy graboids available for sale. We tried to find some to buy but to no avail.

This first Tremors movie doesn't have as much graboid action as the other Tremors movies so we haven't watched this one quite as often as some of the others. But then this movie is the introduction to the whole graboid mythology. And what is a graboid anyway? A graboid is a gigantic, worm-like creature that burrows through the ground at incredible speed and hunts by sound. They eat anything that moves and this does of course include people. They must have dirt to travel through, they can't burrow through rock. Unfortunately they are intelligent and they learn through experience what works and what doesn't.

There is some humor to this movie. The graboid special effects are good, they look like what they are supposed to be but they're so funny-looking and so obviously not real that we've usually laughed when they suddenly pop up out of the ground to eat people. And then each graboid has three tongues that have a sort of "mouth" with teeth at the end for grabbing things and bringing it back to the very large mouth for eating.

Graboids are hard to kill. Even the elephant gun didn't have much of an effect. The best way to kill a graboid is to blow it up with some type of explosive. No need to buy fancy name brand explosives, you can make your own like they did in the movie!

There is very little gross-out factor to this movie. There is one scene where there is a head on the ground under a hat. And it is a shock when they lift the hat and there's a head laying there but there's no blood and, of course, it's not a real head. The only thing that might be gross is when graboids explode. They explode and their orange blood spatters everywhere along with pieces of graboid "flesh." It doesn't look realistic to me and the kids were never freaked out by it. It's actually kind of funny because it looks like someone is throwing a bucket of orange pudding and lunch meat parts on everyone!

The people in the movie live in a town called Perfection. It is a tiny town with only a handful of people living there and most of them are only there because their ancestors had settled there many years ago. It isn't much of a town in the middle of nowhere in the hot desert of Nevada near the California border.

Tremors is a fun fake "monster" movie, give it a try for a little silly entertainment.