Tremors 4 - The Legend Begins

Tremors 4 – The Legend Begins (2003) The Tremors series goes back to 1989 and has successfully made the transition to a TV series, reversing current trends in the other direction. For this round, the subterranean spelunking serpentine carnivores come full circle showing how they originated. The movie also shows the origin of the town of Perfection, NV and the origin of the Gummer clan of survivalists. It is rare for a flick to have to follow ‘rules’ of behavior to tie into the original movie without being boring and blah but T-4 pulls it off rather well. In this one, the mine is attacked by ‘things in the ground’ and the owner (the great grandfather of the original overkill man, Bert Gummer) comes out from Philadelphia to investigate and to get the mine running again. He is a first class tenderfoot but by the end of the flick has taken a rather unhealthy interest in armaments, foretelling the story of generations of Gummers to come, neatly tying into the original Tremors. The story is pretty standard but is typical of a Tremors movie. The effects are well done and the creatures still explode with gusto and goop galore. We have a full multicultural cast to keep everyone politically correct and all the cast enthusiastically take to their roles. This is not a great movie but if you liked the ‘zeitgeist’ of the earlier Tremors movies, you will like this one. The movie is rated PG-13 for: missing miners, missing head, missing the stagecoach, lack of well marked evacuation routes, excessive use of steamrollers, effective hammock defense, ineffective gunslinger, gun eating and for the largest rifle I’ve ever seen.