Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001)

Burt Gummer returns to his hometown of Perfection, Nevada for the first time in years, but the deadliest Graboid evolution yet forces him to save the town he swore to protect. 

REVIEW: After two amazing, perfect, movies, Tremors 3: Back to Perfection came along and ruined the streak.

Michael Gross returns yet again, this time as the main focus of the movie (and from this point onwards in the franchise) and he remains the shining point of this movie. There are other returning characters from the first movie as well, as this returns to the original town of Perfection from the first movie, and their original actors return to reprise those roles for the first time in 11 years, but none of them, nor any of the new characters, are acted all that well aside from Gross as Gummer.

Hell, everything about this one is just...less. The acting, the directing, the story, the level of threat in the movie, and the embarrassingly-bad special effects - all of it is just...less... than they were in the previous two movies. Even the (yet again) new evolution of Graboid, the Assblasters that can glide through the air, seem more silly and less threatening than either of the previous two forms. Add to that, other than 5 seconds at the beginning, there's no Shriekers to be found in this movie other than as little blips on a tracking device, as they remain 100% entirely off screen. And that's a big problem in this movie - so much awesome stuff happens off-screen: The Shriekers' entire existence, most of the deaths in this movie (and the ones we do get are entirely clean and bloodless), it's all off-screen and we don't get to actually see it.

They even forgo the horror aspect that the first two movies brought to the table and went entirely with this really silly, overly-cartoony tone that just didn't work for me at all. There are some humor moments that do work, but on a whole it's nowhere near the style of the humor from the first two, and I didn't need the entire movie to be so silly and cartoony.

Michael Gross as Burt Gummer aside, a few jokes that actually did work aside, and a couple fun scenes (mostly toward the end) aside, Tremors 3: Back to Perfection is easily the low point of this franchise, and I can only recommend it to absolute diehard fans of the series, and even then there's a good chance you won't enjoy it very much.

4/10 rooms in the Psych Ward