Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004)

A prequel to Tremors, this movie tells us about how the town of Perfection, Nevada became founded and how they defended it against the original Graboids with the help of Burt Gummer's ancestor, Hiram Gummer.

REVIEW: For Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, we go back in time to the wild west days, when Perfection was a small mining community called Rejection, and the first batch of Graboids are born, causing havoc.

I love wild west horror movies, especially creature feature ones, and I really think that after the last couple Tremors movies and the TV series, this back-to-basics approach was the best angle for them to take. Just like with the original movie, we have only the initial Graboid form here, and honestly that works just great. Going back to keeping it simple and straight forward, but in a time where heavy artillery was not quite as readily available. Michael Gross returns, but this time he's playing his character's ancestor, a very selfish, lazy, anti-gun rich man - the exact opposite of his Burt Gummer character, and it was hilarious seeing him play against type. Unfortunately the acting overall in this entry is the worst in the entire franchise, however the characters, despite that, still manage to all be fun and quite memorable.

Acting aside, the special effects for the Graboids, the directing of the movie, the chase scenes and death scenes - all those things are miles above what they were in Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, and even the overall story is a hell of a lot of fun and certainly more fun than in Tremors 3. I also loved the bit of continuity with the TV series by including the set piece of the underground mines again, which played a recurring role throughout the TV series as well.

Overall, while Tremors 4: The Legend Begins is still not nearly as good as the first two movies, and the acting does hurt it quite a bit, it's certainly better than the third movie and overall it's a hell of a lot of fun, with tons of really fun sequences and a really engaging climax, bringing everything back to the basics but with a few new twists on it.

7/10 rooms in the Psych Ward