Tremors didn’t get much love when it was initially released in the winter of 1990. Over time, it has garnered a respectable following, spawning three sequels and one television series, and putting it nearly on par with Planet of the Apes. Writers Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson, and director Ron Underwood nicely infuse the classic 1950s B movie monster motif with a touch of goofy, sometimes slapstick humor that manages to avoid degenerating into outright parody or farce.
After John Carpenter’s highly successful Halloween, he tried his hand at horror once again with this eerie ghost story. Adrienne Barbeau’s small town deejay serves as a kind of narrator to the events that unfold in the unsuspecting town of Antonio Bay as townsfolk prepare for its centennial. Though it’s quite a comedown from his slasher classic, it still has his signature suspenseful style.
What is quite possibly the first slasher film (unless you want to get all semantic with The Lodger, another Hitchcock classic). Psycho‘s unusual story structure caught audiences off guard when the star of the movie resolved to be not the top-billed actress but the legendary scene in which she appeared. The nefarious proprietor of the infamous Bates Motel isn’t even introduced until 20 minutes into the story, but once he is, things get unnerving very quickly.
It’s easy to see how Alfred Hitchcock earned his moniker of “Master of Suspense” with this, his first surviving film, wherein he pays homage to the mystery that was Jack the Ripper. This adaptation of a play by Marie Belloc Lowndes has a mysterious lodger appear at the home of a couple with a room to let at about the same time a series of brutal murders terrorize the city.
This follow-up to Clive Barker’s original is a far more interesting examination into the paradoxical concept that pain is pleasure and vice versa. Barker has an oddly intoxicating fascination with the flesh (as can be said of genius Seth Brundle). In this film that fascination is on full display, in particular his affinity for skinless people who have returned from the dead.
In many ways this is superior to Tod Browning’s lifeless original. Gloria Holden plays it straight as the infamous count’s feminine offspring, infusing his undead lineage, perhaps for the first time, with the plaintive anguish that would follow vampires into the late 20th century and beyond.
Those of you who followed along last year may recall my affinity for ghost stories. In keeping with the best of them, director and co-writer David Twohy unravels this terrific little mystery that is, aside from being a good horror movie, an exceptionally well done World War II submarine thriller. Bruce Greenwood, always adept at stolid leadership, here overseas a motley gang of ragged sailors.
An unfairly-maligned meta-sequel that is in many ways cleverer, though not nearly as good or frightening as its predecessor. It’s also the reason that studios greenlight sequels that are virtually identical to their forerunners. Audiences positively hate when you don’t give them the exact same thing they saw before.
You can keep your Silence of the Lambs. I’ll have none of it. Anthony Hopkins took a truly fascinating and authentically creepy sociopath and turned him into a farce, particularly when set against Jonathan Demme’s boilerplate police procedural. Fortunately, Ridley Scott came along and wrapped the character in a wonderfully tragic opera, giving the now legendary cannibal an appropriate outlet for his ostentatious theatrics.
Depending on your disposition, after seeing this you may either get an artificial Christmas tree and spend the rest of your days in solemn repentence of your genocidal past, or buy a plot of land, plant some trees and wish that Christmas would come everyday (I suspect Eli Roth would choose the latter option).