REVIEW: Tremors 5: Bloodline (2015)

I don’t really recall anything beyond Tremors apart from not making it through a sequel featuring Fred Ward.  It may have been the second, but who knows.  Obviously there were three other sequels besides this one.  Beware though, because while I can’t really speak for those movies, I can certainly tell people to not waste their time with Tremors 5: Bloodline.  Don Michael Paul is on the loose again and has fouled up another piece of a franchise.  His last movie was the terrible Jarhead 2: Field of Fire.  So you probably know what to expect here.

Tremors lore has developed since 1990 over the course of direct to video time.  For instance we now know that the Graboid will give birth to the Ass Blaster, a bipedal beast that uses bolts of flame that it shoots from its ass to leap into the air, acting as thrust.  Those are the main antagonists in this movie.  They have surfaced in South Africa, picking off people left and right.  And so a character that rips off Burke from Aliens, who wants a live sample, convinces Graboid specialist Burt Gummer to come out of retirement to hunt both Ass Blasters and Graboids.  Michael Gross returns in this key role, he’s probably the best thing about a weak movie.

Now let’s get something straight, this is a low key movie, with a low budget.  So we shouldn’t expect anything great.  But when you have beautiful locations of South Africa at hand, yet manage to make the movie look ugly and amateur, only the director can be blamed for making it a failure.  It’s not all about cost.  There must be talent.  There are scenes that are so blatantly plagiarised in an attempt to fill in for creative brainfreeze that you don’t know whether to laugh or turn it off.  For instance, when Don Michael Paul attempts to ape the raptor in the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park, he frames everything so obviously and yet so poorly that the will so continue through the movie is sapped.  I wanted to turn this movie off in the first act, long before that by the way.

The Tremors series is also supposed to be funny.  And again a large budget can’t buy you humour.  I did not laugh at this movie.  That’s another problem.  Michael Gross is a cool dude and I got a Graboid/Fred Ward/Kevin Bacon/Elephant Gun nostalgia kick out of seeing him in this movie.  I will also credit the film for using real blanks with the weaponry on screen and for not violently shaking the camera.  But what they really need to do is to get this series back on the big screen.  I don’t want another terrible VOD cash in like this.  Bring back Fred Ward, Kevin Bacon and Michael Gross.

And set it in the town of Perfection.