Saturday, October 13, 2018

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: TREMORS: A COLD DAY IN HELL (2018) **


Graboids have been found in the Great White North.  Naturally, it’s up to Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) and his son (Jamie Kennedy) to stop them.  They eventually learn Burt is suffering from a life-threatening illness due to a run-in with a graboid in a previous installment.  That of course means they must trap one of the giant worms alive to make an antidote.

The long-running Tremors series is more consistently mediocre than your average DTV franchise.  This sixth installment is on the lower rungs of the Tremors ladder, but it’s a slight improvement over the last entry, Bloodlines.  You can say one thing for the Tremors movies:  At least they keep the always great Michael Gross employed. 

Bloodlines did the tried-and-true sequel formula of taking the same premise and putting it in a new location, Africa.  That didn’t really add anything to the Tremors lore besides giving Burt a son he could hurl insults off.  A Cold Day in Hell once again changes the location, this time to the Canadian Arctic.

Now this change showed a modicum of promise.  The opening scene in particular is a real showstopper as several scientists get attacked by a graboid hidden somewhere under the ice and snow.  This sequence also showcases some surprising gore for a PG-13 movie (the frozen severed head was a nice touch).  Too bad the rest of the movie takes place in a thawed stretch of land that’s home to a boring government lab set-up.  From here on out, most of the attacks occur when graboid tentacles crash through windows and/or floorboards.  We do get a nifty “ass-blaster” graboid that flies, but it doesn’t stick around for very long.  In other words, it’s just like any other Tremors movie, but with snow-covered mountains in the background.

It was a shame Kevin Bacon’s Tremors TV show didn’t get picked up.  Maybe now he can finally return to the franchise and give it a proper send-off.  That’s about the only way you’re going to breathe a little life into these movies.  (Or at the very least, get Fred Ward back.)  

Gross gets the best line of the movie when he says, “My balls are in the Guinness book of balls!”

Hey, are you wondering where my review for Tremors:  Bloodlines is?  Well, you can find it in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  To get your copy, follow this handy link:  https://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Book-Horror-Mitch-Lovell/dp/1542566622/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1538450805&sr=8-3 

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