A Cold Day In Hell!

There has rarely been a monster movie as elegantly made as the original Tremors starring Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward. It's a delightfully engaging monster tale, but also just as much a romance as Bacon's character "Valentine" finds love and the ability to commit to love. It's equal parts scary, funny, and downright charming. It also was quite successful, to such an extent that many sequels have been made over the decades, each in its own way trying with limited to success to tap into the  wonder of the original. Sadly with each sequel, despite the considerable talents of Michael Gross who as monster hunter "Burt Gummer", they stray further and further away.

The most recent one title Tremors: A Cold Day In Hell begins with considerable promise as we find ourselves with an arctic research team which finds itself in the snow attacked by yet another one of the monsters dubbed a "Graboid". It's a furious and grotesque beginning which sadly is followed up by almost none of the same visual glory. The problem is budget, these sequels are all hamstrung by small budgets and so the splendor of seeing a Graboid in the snow is  never equaled in a movie which for practical purposes could have been shot in northern California. It was in fact shot in South Africa, not famous for its northern vistas. They blame climate change in the movie for the fact there is no snow, but it spoils what little was novel about his new installment.

We get a bunch of people in danger, who have to use their wits and and courage to survive. They of course don't all make it, but sadly there's very little surprising in how any of the characters buy it in this one, which relies much too much on the past rhythms and beats of the series. Gross is joined by Jaime Kennedy in these movies, a new partner and I won't say much about him save that I find his persona and character painfully unlikable and wish almost every moment of the movie that he'd get eaten. He doesn't, so another sequel seems inevitable. It's sad really, I'm a fan of these and I'm getting tired of them -- not a good thing.

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