TREMORS 4: THE LEGEND BEGINS (2004) One hopes, the series ends It's hard for a series to run out of gas as thoroughly as have the Tremors movies. A simple enough concept, spread over enough movies, is going to start making eyes roll no matter how good it sounded at first. Unlike most movies with sequels, Tremors has even had a short-lived TV series to further dilute the idea. If you're looking for used-up, expended, exhausted, drained, depleted...people, I give you Tremors 4. The old west setting (back when the miniscule town of Perfection was inexplicably called Rejection) must've seemed fresh for about as long as it took to write page one of the script. A century before the events of Tremors, Rejection was a mining town with a few residents that echo the original film's cast; like a red-haired proprietrix of a hotel, and a family of Chinese immigrants running the general store. That Michael Gross (playing, one assumes, the ancestor of the character in the original film) apparently hooks up with the redhead at the end (he was married to Reba McEntyre in the original movie) suggests generations of inbreeding. The mine runs into trouble - that is, the graboids. What we first see of them is like their original form, just much smaller (they leap out of the ground and splash back in, like trout). Then they get bigger and are exactly like the creatures from the first film - no Ass-Blasters, no, uh...whatever they were called in the second movies. Standard, old-school graboids. You've probably already guessed the big problem here: the audience is always way, way ahead of all of the characters. No new creatures means we already know the rules under which they operate. These guys spend most of the movie figuring stuff out I knew when I was seventeen. Gross plays the owner of the mine, a (supposedly) well-to-do urban dandy who says things like "This idyllic western retreat shall not fall prey to these mindless predators!" and "Whoa, you intransigent beasts!" (same scene!). He doesn't sound much like the gun nut from the original film, but he does become one in the end, even hauling out something called a "punt gun" - no idea if such a weapon ever actually existed, but it looks like a shotgun designed for twenty-foot-tall men. Doesn't seem like a practical weapon for the likes of Michael Gross. PG-13 and a light one at that (only one character with more than a line of dialogue gets graboided, and he's the one who's supposed to be creepy)...what gore there is, again, is graboid gore, and the best potential for that gore (involving a pretty clever use of a saw) is underground and conveyed entirely with a bubbling pool of orange. I never did see an episode of the TV series, and that it would go on the air on Sci-Fi after Farscape was freshly cancelled cuts like a scalpel dipped in jalapeno extract. Any further life this series might have in it will have to be provided by some significant evolution of the concept. Without that, this series is walking (uh, tunnelling) dead. BACK TO THE T's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE