Tremors 2: Aftershocks
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 | This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (February 2008) |
| Tremors 2: Aftershocks | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | S.S. Wilson |
| Written by | Brent Maddock & S.S. Wilson & Ron Underwood (characters) Brent Maddock & S.S. Wilson (screenplay) |
| Produced by | Christopher DeFaria Nancy Roberts |
| Starring | Fred Ward Christopher Gartin Helen Shaver Michael Gross Marcelo Tubert Marco Hernandez José Ramón Rosario Thomas Rosales Jr. |
| Cinematography | Virgil L. Harper |
| Edited by | Bob Ducsay |
| Music by | Jay Ferguson |
| Distributed by | Universal Studios |
Release dates | April 9, 1996 (USA) |
Running time | 96 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $4,000,000 |
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.
Plot
The movie begins with a scene in Petromaya Oil Feilds, Mexico, where a lone oil worker is shown inching along a suspended pipeline, trying to escape a Graboid under the ground. He sees a truck, but is unsuccesful in reaching it, being eaten by the Graboid. This is six years after the events of Tremors.
Earl Bassett is still living in Perfection, Nevada grimly running the small ostrich farm which is all that remains of his attempts to cash in on his encounter with the Graboids, gigantic burrowing worm-predators that hunt by sound. Hustling young cab-driver Grady Hoover brings Senor Ortega, the owner of Petromaya, to the farm. Ortega tells Earl that a new Graboid infestation has broken out in his company's fields, and he wants to hire the reluctant Earl as a Graboid hunter. Learning he will be equipped by the Mexican army and paid $50,000 for each Graboid destroyed, Earl grudgingly accepts and takes on Grady as his assistant. Later, Ortega also offers double if they are able to capture one alive.
They travel to the oil refinery, and after meeting the operation's skeleton crew (geologist Kate Reilly, for whom Earl feels an immediate attraction, her assistant Julio, and chief engineer Pedro) they begin their hunt. At first their plan works quite well, bagging them several Graboids: they drag a long noisy chain behind their truck, thus attracting Graboids to them. After locating each approaching Graboid with 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 gets blown up by remote detonation. Then the "bait" chain gets snagged by a passing Graboid, which takes the truck on a wild drag through the countryside before finally snapping free. The seismograph further reports to the stunned hunters that a dozen more Graboids are swarming in the ground around them. They beat a temporary retreat, and Earl summons reinforcements: Burt Gummer, a paranoid survivalist in Perfection who also survived the first Graboid invasion. Burt's wife has left him, and Earl's call snaps him out of a deep depression. He arrives at the refinery in an enormous 'Federalè' army truck loaded with tons of high explosives and supplies, including mounds of concentrated military field rations.
Earl, Grady, and Burt resume the hunt, the two teams quickly getting into a semi-friendly competition. Earl and Grady track a Graboid which is wandering aimlessly instead of hunting food; when the thing suddenly looms up in front of them, they crash their truck, forcing them to call for Pedro to come with his tow truck. They then discover the ailing Graboid is as immobilized as their vehicle. Grady is excited, as they have "captured" a live one, but Earl is at uneasy about it. A few hours later, it starts screaming loudly, and Grady is worried something might be attacking it. When they check back on the creature, they find only its hollowed-out corpse.
Earl and Grady finally see the tow truck's stationary headlights in the distance. After wait about an hour with the truck still not moving, they take a nervous nighttime trek across open country, and discover Pedro dead and the truck's engine torn up. They race to a nearby radio tower, only to find the tower's machinery destroyed as well. As they hotwire a nearby car, they learn what 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 here, but in the third Tremors film they are dubbed "Shriekers" for the harsh screams they emit.) Earl and Grady flee in the car when they hear a whole swarm of the creatures rampaging towards them.
They return to the refinery and shoot two more of the beasts, but not in time to save Julio from being killed. Burt then reappears driving his very battered truck; he was ambushed by the main Shrieker swarm and barely survived, running over most of them and wiping out the rest at the unprecedented cost of using up all his ammunition. On the positive side, one of the Shriekers was only stunned, leading Burt to "detain" it. Experiments with the now-caged Shrieker reveal two things: the aforementioned heat-seeking abilities, and that when fed enough, the creatures reproduce asexually.
Meanwhile, another previously-stunned shrieker drops off the underside of Burt's truck and finds his rations, which leads to an explosive regrowth of the population. After the humans play a deadly version of hide-and-seek with the new Shrieker swarm around the complex, (and Earl finds time to bond with Kate) Burt lures all the creatures into a building where he parked his truck and temporarily traps them there, only to shortly find out that he locked them in the food storage building. Earl has himself covered with fire extinguisher residue, which allows him to enter the garage undetected and gather some bombs. However, the cold covering of the carbon dioxide only lasts long enough for Earl to activate a timed bomb and toss it on top of Burt's mound of explosives before escaping through a window. The humans flee to a relatively safe distance and the entire refinery is leveled by a massive blast, killing all the Shriekers and leaving a huge crater. As they survey the remains, Grady cheerfully points out just how much bounty money they now have coming to them: 28 dead Graboids making $1,400,000. the film ends with Earl commenting that they should charge for "all those little ones too".
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")
External links
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