Tremors 2: Aftershocks
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| Tremors 2: Aftershocks | |
|---|---|
 Video cover |
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| Directed by | S.S. Wilson |
| Produced by | Brent Maddock Ron Underwood Christopher DeFaria Nancy Roberts |
| Written by | Brent Maddock S.S. Wilson |
| Starring | Fred Ward Christopher Gartin Helen Shaver Michael Gross Marcelo Tubert Marco Hernandez José Ramón Rosario Thomas Rosales Jr. |
| Music by | Jay Ferguson |
| Cinematography | Virgil L. Harper |
| Editing by | Bob Ducsay |
| Distributed by | MCA |
| Release date(s) | 9 April 1996 |
| Running time | 96 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $4,000,000 |
| Preceded by | Tremors |
| Followed by | Tremors 3: Back to Perfection |
| IMDb profile | |
Tremors 2: Aftershocks is a 1996 monster film and sequel to Tremors (1990), in which the character of Earl Bassett, returning from the first movie, is hired to deal with a subterranean "Graboid" infestation at a Mexican oilfield. It was directed by S.S. Wilson, and stars Fred Ward, Christopher Gartin, Michael Gross and Helen Shaver.
[edit] Synopsis
Six years after the events of Tremors, Earl Bassett (Ward) is still living in Perfection, Nevada, grimly running the small ostrich farm which is all that remains of his various attempts to cash in on his encounter with the Graboids, gigantic burrowing worm-creatures that feed on meat and hunt by sound. A hustling young cab-driver named Grady Hoover (Gartin) brings a Mexican oil company executive to the farm. The executive tells Earl that a new Graboid infestation has broken out in his company's fields, and that he would like Earl to help. Earl refuses to consider the idea until he finds out he will be fully equipped by the Mexican army, and be paid $50,000 for each Graboid killed and $100,000 for each live Graboid caught. He grudgingly accepts and, because his former partner Valentine McKee is now married and "retired" and no one else will be crazy enough to volunteer to help, also accepts Grady as his assistant on the venture. (McKee was played in the first film by Kevin Bacon and does not appear here.)
Earl and Grady travel to the oil refinery, and after meeting the skeleton crew that was left there to assist them (geologist Kate Rielly (Shaver), for whom Earl feels an immediate attraction, Kate's assistant Julio, and chief engineer Pedro) they begin their hunt. At first their technique works quite well, bagging them twelve Graboids: they drag a long heavy chain behind their truck, making noise, and thus attracting the Graboids to them. After locating an approaching Graboid on their on-board seismograph, the pair steer a remote-control toy car strapped with TNT towards the target creature which pulls down the car, and then gets blown up by remote detonation. Their confidence is short-lived: the "bait" chain gets snagged by Graboid #13, which drags the truck through the fields before finally snapping free on a boulder. The hunters are further stunned by the seismograph's report that maybe a dozen more Graboids are swarming in the ground around them. They beat a temporary retreat, and Earl calls for reinforcements: Burt Gummer (Gross), a paranoid survivalist back in Perfection who faced the first Graboid invasion with Earl. Burt's wife has left him, and the call snaps him out of a deep aimless depression. He soon arrives at the oil refinery in an enormous 'Federalè' army truck loaded with two and half tons of high explosives, along with weapons and supplies including mounds of military rations: MREs.
Earl, Grady, and Burt resume the hunt, and Burt destroys the Graboid that had previously dragged Earl's truck, which leads to a semi-friendly competition between the two teams. Earl and Grady track a Graboid which seems to be wandering aimlessly instead of hunting for food. When the thing suddenly looms up in front of them, they crash their truck backwards down a steep rock face, trapping the vehicle and forcing them to call for Pedro to come rescue them in his tow truck. While waiting on the relative safety of a non-diggable boulder, they see the Graboid poked halfway out of the ground and seemingly as immobilized as their truck. They think they have bagged themselves a $100,000 catch, but when night falls and they check back on the creature, it appears to have exploded from the inside, as if something had eaten its way out.
Off in the distance they see the tow truck's stationary headlights and after a very nervous trek across open country discover the truck torn up and destroyed, with Pedro's severed arms dangling bloodily from a rollbar. Earl and Grady race to a nearby radio tower to warn the others of this mysterious new danger, only to find the tower's machinery destroyed as well. As they hotwire a handy car, they learn about the next stage in the Graboid life-cycle, the things that hatched out of the "sick" Graboid: low-slung two-legged creatures that gather in packs and hunt by heat, explaining their attacks on the truck and the tower. (The beasts are never given a name in this movie, but in the third Tremors film they were dubbed "Shriekers" for the harsh screams they emit.) Burt and Grady shoot one of them, and flee in the car when they hear a whole swarm rampaging towards them.
They get back to the refinery and shoot a couple more of the roving Shriekers, but not in time to save Julio from being cut down in front of a horrified Kate. Burt then reappears as well, driving his very battered truck. He recounts how he was ambushed by a mass of Shriekers in a canyon and barely escaped with his life, running over most of them and beating the rest off with 'small arms fire and hand-to-hand techniques', at the totally unprecedented cost of using up all his ammo. On the positive side, he discovered that one of the Shriekers was only stunned, and he trussed it up and brought it back with him. The humans drag the Shrieker inside and place it in a cage, where they discover the aforementioned heat seeking abilities. They also learn that the creatures reproduce asexually, a parent spitting up a child when it had been fed enough.
As they are doing this, another previously-stunned Shrieker drops off the underside of Burt's truck and finds his supply of MREs, which leads to an immediate and explosive regrowth of the population. After the survivors play a deadly version of hide-and-seek with the new Shrieker swarm around the complex, Burt lures all the creatures back into the building where he parked his truck, and traps them there long enough for Earl to activate a timed bomb, which he tosses on top of Burt's mound of explosives. The humans flee to a relatively safe distance and the entire refinery is leveled by a massive blast, killing all the Shriekers. As they survey the damage, Grady cheerfully points out just how much bounty money they now have coming to them.
[edit] Cast
- Fred Ward - Earl Bassett
- Christopher Gartin - Grady Hoover
- Helen Shaver - Kate 'White' Reilly
- Michael Gross - Burt Gummer
- Marcelo Tubert - Señor Ortega
- Marco Hernandez - Julio, Kate's Assistant
- José Ramón Rosario - Pedro, Chief Engineer (credited as "José Rosario")
- Thomas Rosales Jr. - Oil Worker (credited as "Thomas Rosales")
[edit] Sequels
The film was followed by two more sequels: Tremors 3: Back to Perfection and Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, along with a short-lived TV series on the Sci-Fi Channel. Michael Gross was the star of all of these productions; it is noted at one point that Earl and Grady use their reward money to start a Graboid theme park.
