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Most horror movies take place in the dark. "Tremors" (citywide), a jocular good-time monster film with surprises up its sleeve, is set in the clear day, in a desert landscape that seems to stretch endlessly toward the Sierra. In this National Geographic wasteland, full of vast cliffs, buttes, arroyos and clumps of rock, nothing, so it seems, can hide. The air is so clear, the terrain so vast, that the little desert town slapped in the middle of it-sarcastically named Perfection-seems invulnerable to sneak attack. Except, of course, from below.
That's where producers-writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock and director Ron Underwood spring the assault on their nine complacent Perfectionites. That subterranean menace comes from four huge earthworms: 30 feet long, ravenously hungry, with huge split, snaky tentacle-tongues that grab victims and suck them down.
These worms, ingeniously designed by Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis, have a lot more personality than the ones in "Dune." For one thing, they're frighteningly fast and agile, tunneling under the desert with terrifying speed, executing all sorts...