Surprisingly for a thirty-year-old franchise that's... What is it?... 7 installments?... into its run, TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND is actually quite good, at least for those of us who are fans of the franchise. As with nearly all of the Tremors installments, this installment is mostly composed of a new environment for the graboids to play in (an isolated tropical island this time) together with some new monster "functionality" to freshen up the creatures and give us Tremors fans something new to explore. In this installment the creatures have been genetically fiddled with using stem cell technology so who knows what they might be able to do? This basic graboid formula has worked well in the past and continues to work here. Some new and fresh mixed together with the tried and reliable.
Good ol' Burt Gummer is here again to give us confidence that we might just survive this encounter, not to mention the fact that at this point it's doubtful any Tremors movie would even be accepted as such without him in it.
A bit darker than many of the installments but still clearly recognizable as being from the legitimate Tremors pedigree, TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND actually stands out in terms of the quality of the creature effects. There are a couple of sequences involving fire and flamethrowers which are absolutely top shelf and really serve to put some serious monster horror topspin on the whole thing.
For me, the only hitch in the entire affair was noticing that Burt Gummer, who basically looked only a handful of years older than he did in the very first Tremors movie, seemed to be showing a bit of stiffness in his movements. Ol' Burt (Michael Gross) is seventy-three, after all, and has been fighting bloodthirsty monsters for thirty years. One has to expect that to put a bit of rust on the gun barrel.
SPOILER:
Burt is apparently killed near the end and the end of the movie is a "loving" retrospective composed of clips of Burt being Burt and culled from all of the Tremors movies. I think we can probably surmise that this is the unequivocal end of our adventures with Burt Gummer; he does just sort of disappear at the end, although we do have reason to believe that the graboid got him, but there is no body or certain evidence of his demise. If the movie had ended on that note, we could probably convince ourselves that if there is another Tremors movie it will turn out that Burt somehow miraculously survived. Burt HAS been swallowed by graboids before, after all. But I think the redux of Burt Gummer scenes puts the writing clearly upon the wall. An entirely appropriate end to the movie and the franchise, but it reflects my affection for the Tremors world to the extent that it left me feeling old and sad.
TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND is clearly not the GONE WITH THE WIND of monster movies, as neither were ANY of the Tremors movies. But they have an undeniable and very worthwhile panache all their own and TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND holds its own easily with any in the franchise with the possible exception of the very first one, but it is at least a close second.
If you're not a fan of the franchise, you won't really fully enjoy TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND and may perhaps wonder where all the affection comes from. But if you like unabashed, wholehearted monster pictures with a little style and craft to them and characters you inevitably come to love, give yourself a treat and run through the franchise from beginning to end. It's worth it.
Good ol' Burt Gummer is here again to give us confidence that we might just survive this encounter, not to mention the fact that at this point it's doubtful any Tremors movie would even be accepted as such without him in it.
A bit darker than many of the installments but still clearly recognizable as being from the legitimate Tremors pedigree, TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND actually stands out in terms of the quality of the creature effects. There are a couple of sequences involving fire and flamethrowers which are absolutely top shelf and really serve to put some serious monster horror topspin on the whole thing.
For me, the only hitch in the entire affair was noticing that Burt Gummer, who basically looked only a handful of years older than he did in the very first Tremors movie, seemed to be showing a bit of stiffness in his movements. Ol' Burt (Michael Gross) is seventy-three, after all, and has been fighting bloodthirsty monsters for thirty years. One has to expect that to put a bit of rust on the gun barrel.
SPOILER:
Burt is apparently killed near the end and the end of the movie is a "loving" retrospective composed of clips of Burt being Burt and culled from all of the Tremors movies. I think we can probably surmise that this is the unequivocal end of our adventures with Burt Gummer; he does just sort of disappear at the end, although we do have reason to believe that the graboid got him, but there is no body or certain evidence of his demise. If the movie had ended on that note, we could probably convince ourselves that if there is another Tremors movie it will turn out that Burt somehow miraculously survived. Burt HAS been swallowed by graboids before, after all. But I think the redux of Burt Gummer scenes puts the writing clearly upon the wall. An entirely appropriate end to the movie and the franchise, but it reflects my affection for the Tremors world to the extent that it left me feeling old and sad.
TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND is clearly not the GONE WITH THE WIND of monster movies, as neither were ANY of the Tremors movies. But they have an undeniable and very worthwhile panache all their own and TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND holds its own easily with any in the franchise with the possible exception of the very first one, but it is at least a close second.
If you're not a fan of the franchise, you won't really fully enjoy TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND and may perhaps wonder where all the affection comes from. But if you like unabashed, wholehearted monster pictures with a little style and craft to them and characters you inevitably come to love, give yourself a treat and run through the franchise from beginning to end. It's worth it.