Tremors

The satirical horror movie has proved as popular, in recent years, as the horror movie proper. With franchise reboots for ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and a new franchise courtesy of the ‘Saw’ movies, there have been any number of ironic repasts, from the subversively satirical ‘Severance’ to the out-and-out spoofery of the ‘Scary Movie’ quartet.

But before any of these, before ‘Black Sheep’ or ‘Dog Soldiers’, before ‘Eight Legged Freaks’, there was ‘Tremors’. And ‘Tremors’ did it better than any of its successors. And definitely better than any of its sequels.

Let’s draw a discreet veil over its sequels. And its prequel.

‘Tremors’ is a knowing, playful, but – when it matters – impressively suspenseful throwback to the “creature features” of the 1950s. It boasts a smart script with plentiful sharp dialogue (“we use forward planning – that way we don’t have to do anything right now”), a terrific double act in Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, an effectively offbeat supporting role for C&W megastar Reba McEntire (who also provides the toe-tapping end credits song) as a gun-toting survivalist, and pacy direction from Ron Underwood that makes the best use of the Nevada setting.

The film opens with casual labourers Earl (Ward) and Valentine (Bacon) vowing to leave the small town of Perfection (a place that could be described as ‘backwater’ except that it’s a desert) when their situation – by dint of a succession of shitty jobs, quite literally in the case of a nasty encounter with a septic tank – becomes untenable. Only fate is working against them. Within the first quarter of the film, they make three attempts to leave the facetiously named Perfection, but are forced to turn back each time, Valentine opining the occurrence of divine intervention when a rockfall proves the last straw.

Already the movie is whole lot better than it has any right to be, because of the economy with which Underwood establishes his protagonists, their razor-sharp repartee and – more so – because Earl and Valentine are Everyman personified. Anyone who has held down a crap job, bemoaned their lot in life and/or wished for something better will recognise in them kindred spirits. The fact that things proceed to get a whole lot worse, thanks entirely to the ministrations of a bunch of subterranean monsters, just seems perfectly in keeping with Earl and Valentine’s talent for misfortune.

Ah, the monsters. I don’t know why – it probably says something about the weird workings of my mind – but I can’t help thinking that if the spice worms from ‘Dune’ hung out with the hillbillies from ‘Deliverance’, necked a little moonshine and spent a few generations breeding with their sisters, the big ugly wormy things in ‘Tremors’ are pretty much what the result would be. Their grotesqueness is almost comical, and this epitomises ‘Tremors’ nicely.

The film is tense in the right places (the worms’ attack on a couple out camping is a brilliantly sustained set piece) and gooey in the right places (don’t watch it over dinner), with a sardonic sense of dark humour overarching the whole thing. It set Underwood up to direct ‘City Slickers’ the following year, though sadly he’s done nothing of note since, and it still remains arguably the best film of its kind.

The Host

‘The Host’ opens with a US military type browbeating a Korean serviceman into illegally dumping some chemicals into the Han River in Seoul. Cut to: two fisherman noticing a mutated aquatic life form. Cut to: someone committing suicide off a bridge over the Han, a hulking shape awaiting him under the churning surface of the dark water.

That’s all there is by way of prologue or provenance. Five minutes later, the beastie is on the rampage. Wonderfully-named director Joon-ho Bong pitches his first big set-piece in a fractured filmic middle ground between comedy and terror. The monster is part laughable, part grotesque. But it moves. Thundering out of the water, it charges along the riverbank; chaos ensues. When it dives back in, it takes with it a young girl. Her divided, dysfunctional family spend the rest of the film trying to get her back.

Sounds formulaic enough, but Bong takes the material, by degrees, into less expected territory. Farcical family squabbles are played out against a backdrop of military intervention, the monster’s “infected” victims herded brutally into quarantine. The government – its strings pulled by the US military – turn out to be as monstrous, and as threatening to the protagonists’ survival, as the beast itself. Perhaps more so.

The final stand-off against the monster comes after two hours of governmental deception, media hysteria and social betrayals on every level. The beast has become a metaphor for la bete humaine – the beast in man. The creature feature has become political.

Small quibbles: the film is a tad overlong; the effects in the explosive finale could have benefited from better CGI. But these are minor matters. Ultimately, ‘The Host’ is a damn good movie, playing fast and loose with genre conventions, pulling the rug gleefully out from under the audience as the broad humour of the first half morphs into political satire of the sharpest and darkest hue.

Cloverfield: some questions

Why doesn't the monster turn up ten minutes earlier so we don't have to spend any longer listening to the witless yammerings of a bunch of personality-challenged twenty-somethings than is absolutely necessary?

Why, if Hud has been carrying a torch for Marlena, doesn't it occur to him that he'll earn some serious brownie points by putting the camera down and his arm protectively around her?

Why does Hud become an accomplished camera-man during the quieter, more intimate moments, yet prove utterly useless at composition and focus when there's actually something visual happening?

And why does he have such an acute knack for product placement?

Why couldn't there have been a script polish, so that the endless variations on "Rob! Rob! Fuck, man, where you going? Rob! Jesus, dude, did you see that?" were replaced with either erudite dialogue or blessed silence?

Why, during the scene in the military facility, does no-one ever say "Son, give me the camera" and follow it up with the butt of a rifle to the face?

Why, with the monster laying waste to the city, does everyone stop to loot 36-inch widescreen TVs from an electrical goods shop instead of hotwiring the hottest models at a Mercedes dealership, putting the pedal down and making a decent stab at getting out alive?

Why didn't it end with ...

SPOILER ALERT

... that poignant, almost poetic image of the camera unable to focus on Hud's face as he lies dead in front of the very gizmo he's clung onto the whole time ...

SPOILER ENDS

... instead of lumbering on for another ten minutes as the melodrama and cliches pile up?

Why, faced with the inevitable prospect of a 'Cloverfield' sequel, do I find myself hoping that the camcorder-wielder this time around will be a White House intern capturing grainy footage of a big scaly monster stepping on Dubya's head?

Go, monster, go.