A Cold Day in Hell really isn't that cold, and it's also not so hot.
Soon after the 2015 release of Tremors 5: Bloodlines, it was announced that Kevin Bacon had signed on to reprise the role of Tremors hero Valentine McKee for the first time in twenty-five years, bringing the character back for a television series that was being produced by Blumhouse. A pilot for that show was written by Andrew Miller and directed by Vincenzo Natali, and the project was set up at Syfy (who picked it up after the show was originally going to happen at Amazon).
The Graboids were changing and the sequels were being ignored, but a Tremors show starring Kevin Bacon sounds like a slam dunk to me. Syfy didn't see it that way. They decided to pass on the series, and the pilot has never been released to the public. Just three days after that cancellation was confirmed, Universal Home Entertainment released the latest sequel that would have had nothing to do with the Val show, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell.
Eleven years passed between the releases of Tremors 4 and 5, but fans didn't have to wait nearly as long between the fifth and sixth films. Star Michael Gross - who, unlike Bacon, has stuck with the franchise since the beginning (but was not asked to make an appearance on the Bacon-led series) - announced that a new movie was being made just eleven months after the release of part 5. Once again, I was excited, because I'm always excited to hear that we're going to get more Tremors, but I was also concerned. I had enjoyed Tremors 5, but not as much as its predecessors, and I had issues with it that could all be connected back to the fact that Universal had decided they didn't want Stampede Entertainment - the people who created Tremors and had creative control over all previous installments - to be involved with the film, for whatever reason. While it was based on a screenplay written by the Stampede folks, and was still close enough to that screenplay that they received credit (but chose to go by pseudonyms), Tremors 3 writer John Whelpley and new-to-the-franchise director Don Michael Paul still altered things enough that Tremors 5 was clearly not a Stampede production. Universal didn't ask Stampede back for part 6, either. So we were getting another Stampede-less sequel, this time with no connection to the Stampede people at all. Whelpley and Paul were returning to build this one from the ground up.
Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell was released on May 1, 2018. When I watched it, I was not very pleased at all. For the first time, my primary reaction to a Tremors movie was negative. That's part of the reason why it has taken me two and a half years to get around to writing about it. I did not enjoy the movie, so I set it aside for a couple years. Rewatching it, I found that it wasn't as bad as I remembered it being, but it's not a movie I can muster up much enthusiasm for.
Like Aftershocks and Bloodlines (and the opening scene of Back to Perfection), this sequel finds survivalist turned expert monster hunter Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) being called in to deal with a Graboid problem in a different country. Gummer has gone on a Graboid hunt in Mexico, blasted down Shriekers (the two-legged second stage of the Graboid life cycle) in Argentina, and battled Graboids and Ass-Blasters (the third stage of the Graboid life cycle, two-legged creatures that can also fly when propelled off the ground by a mixture of gasses blasted from their rears) in South Africa. This time around, the monster problem is in the Canadian Arctic. That's why "Cold" is in the subtitle... although we'll find out that it's not actually very cold in the Arctic at this time.
A Cold Day in Hell was filmed in South Africa, just like Bloodlines. When you see snow in this movie, it was really desert sand; in post-production they used "filters and video processing techniques" to make the sand look like white snow. It works well enough, but it is tough to take it seriously when you know the actors were in the desert. We see some of this sand-snow trickery right up front in the opening scene, in which members of an international research team are shown drilling into the frozen land of the Arctic to take a core sample. Instead of accomplishing that task, all three of them are taken out by a Graboid that comes burrowing its way out of the ground.
Graboids looked different in Bloodlines than they had ever looked before, and the explanation for this was that they were a different species of the creature, the South African variety. Of course, since this movie was made by the same creative team, the Graboids in this one look exactly the same as they looked in Bloodlines, despite being in the Arctic instead of South Africa. I don't like this new version of the Graboids nearly as much as those seen in the earlier films. They're too over-the-top for my liking, the way they're always launching themselves out of the ground and corkscrewing through the air on their way to grabbing a victim just makes me roll my eyes. I prefer the earlier Graboids that barely break the surface and let their tentacle-tongues grab their victims and drag them into their mouths. The opening scene with the Graboid attacking the research team members is already enough to show me I'm not going to like how the Graboids are portrayed in this movie. In fact, there's a moment I hate, when a Graboid bursts out of the ground right beside a person, grabs them, and tosses them further away so it can properly spiral down at them. That is not the behavior of the Graboids I know and love. The only thing that puts a smile on my face in this scene is when the American can't remember whether another team member is Swedish and Norwegian, and that's just because the country confusion is a nod to John Carpenter's The Thing.
There are also nods to the first Tremors movie throughout A Cold Day in Hell, starting with the moment in which the American gets caught up on the device he was using to drill for the core sample and dragged across the ground when a Graboid pulls it away. The same sort of thing happens to a road worker using a jackhammer in the first movie.
Once we've established that there's at least one ravenous Graboid loose in the Arctic, the film takes us to Perfection, where we catch up with Burt. He's now managing Chang's Market while the owner - Jodi Chang from Tremors 3 and the '03 TV show - is said to be off working at a law firm in Reno. Burt is the only Perfection resident we see, but it was nice of Whelpley to provide some kind of update on what's going on with Jodi, a character he helped create, and it's cool to see Chang's Market again. Bloodlines didn't show us Perfection at all, so a trip back to the town was long overdue.
I can't say I'm a fan of the first scene that plays out in Chang's, where Burt gets a visit from Special Agent Dalkwed (Danny Keogh) of the U.S. Treasury. The interaction between Burt and this taxman is really unpleasant to sit through, and not just because Dalkwed delivers the bad news that Burt's property has been seized (luckily he has no financial interest in Chang's) and his possessions are going to be auctioned off due to his "failure to file penalties and interest". Dalkwed is a rather disgusting person and the two characters have a heated exchange with some rough language being shouted at each other. During Bloodlines I was a bit put off by how angry and intense Burt was in his interactions with people, often coming off like a douche. He certainly has reason to be upset with Dalkwed, but his unnecessarily abrasive behavior continues in this movie even when he's not dealing with Dalkwed.
One thing that did change about Burt is the hat he wears. Up to this point, he has always worn Atlanta Hawks hats, but for this one Gross decided he wanted to show some of his own hometown pride and wear a Chicago Cubs hat. This leads to people asking Burt if he has "changed teams" a couple times in the movie, to which he replies, "No, just hats!"
When Dalkwed - thankfully, finally - leaves Chang's, Jamie Kennedy enters the picture, reprising his Bloodlines role of Travis B. Welker, who Burt was shocked to discover was his son. The result of a brief relationship he had with a hippie girl named Jasmine in Florida back in 1974. We find out that Burt and Travis have had a bit of a rocky relationship since the events of Bloodlines - which, yeah, is going to happen when Burt is so grumpy these days (I really miss the Burt of the second and third movies, and the TV show). At one point Burt screams at Travis over nothing, and Travis responds, "Take it easy, Burt." That's my reaction to most of Burt's behavior in 5 and 6. Burt and Travis were working together on survivalist videos, but that business fell apart when Travis needed to take a mental health break.
I'm sure Kennedy was given a lot of room to improv, and it certainly seems like he's ad libbing like a madman, like he does his own rewrite on nearly every line Travis is given in the script. The constant barrage of wisecracks coming from the character's mouth takes Travis right up to the edge of being annoying, but I find him to be tolerable for the most part.
It's while Burt and Travis are having their first conversation that we start to get the hint that something's wrong with Burt in this movie. He complains of a headache and has to go off to get some "shut eye" in the early afternoon... and we see that he has made the odd decision to sleep on a cot on the market's roof. His nap is disrupted by a horrific nightmare about Graboids, and right after he wakes up Travis is there to tell him that someone's on the phone to talk to him about Graboids.
That Arctic research team has gotten in contact with Burt because they believe their three dead team members were killed by a Graboid. They were able to come to that conclusion because one of the team members, a young woman named Valerie (Jamie Lee Money) has extensive knowledge about Graboids. Although Burt at first believes that it would be impossible for Graboids to be in the Arctic, he is so impressed by how much Valerie is able to tell him about the creatures that he agrees to look into the problem. He grabs some weapons and puts on some Arctic-appropriate cameo gear - and seeing him in this get-up makes me think of action figures that have different types of outfits for different environments. On his way out, Travis talks him into letting him come along on this mission so he can learn more about dealing with Graboids. Burt is the only Graboid hunter in the world, who's going to take on that job when he can't do it anymore? Travis volunteers.
Burt and Travis are flown to the research outpost by quirky alcohol enthusiast Mac (Adrienne Pearce), sort of like the female equivalent to the quirky, drunken pilot they hung out with in Bloodlines. Their flight over the Arctic gets bumpy when Burt gets the proof he needs to know for sure that there's monster trouble in the area: Mac's little plane is attacked by an Ass-Blaster. It's not much of a dogfight, Mac doesn't even realize what's going on, but it is still fun to see an Ass-Blaster menace a plane.
It has been said that if Stampede had the chance to make more episodes of the 2003 Tremors TV show, one idea was to have someone get trapped with an Ass-Blaster "in a cave in winter, in the snowy mountains above Perfection. It's freezing cold, so, without getting killed, you have to provoke the Ass-Blaster into firing its gasses to keep the place warm". This film putting Ass-Blasters in the Arctic is probably the closest we'll ever get to seeing any of that idea brought to the screen.
Mac manages to get everyone safely on the ground despite the plane's engine being blown, and then our Graboid hunters are introduced to the characters they'll be interacting with at the research outpost. These are Rita Sims (Tanya van Graan), the head of the team, who will also soon become an unlikely love interest for Travis; the jumpy Freezze (Francesco Nassimbeni), who was hoping Mac would be able to fly him out of there; "local boy" Aklark (Keeno Lee Hector); RC plane fan Hart Hansen (Kiroshan Naidoo); wild handyman Swackhammer (Rob van Vuuren); Dr. D (Jay Anstey); Geo-Tech Vargas (Christie Peruso); and the person responsible for getting Burt and Travis to the Arctic, Valerie, an intern who's into mathematical geo-sciences.
Viewers probably won't catch all those names, let alone come to care about many, if any, of the characters. They're a mostly bland bunch. From Swackhammer's lines and demeanor, and the scene where a version of "Mustang Sally" plays on the soundtrack while he tosses sticks of dynamite and dances around, I get the feeling that Paul and Whelpley were aiming to make this guy a fan favorite. I find him irritating at best, and downright creepy when he says that he has given a Graboid the name Sally Soulsmasher. Named after an ex, "a dirty, man-eating bitch who used to stick her nose where it didn't belong". His delivery of that line is chilling.
There is something special about Valerie. We soon find out why she knows so much about Graboids - and how she got a pair of Graboid skin boots. She is the daughter of Valentine McKee and his love interest Rhonda LeBeck, and it's implied that Val hasn't been the easiest person to get along with since the events of the first movie. That TV series Bacon wanted to make was going to show us that Val had a rough relationship with a daughter as well, although the daughter wasn't going to be named Valerie there. It's also implied that Val and family relocated to Oregon in this continuity instead of staying around Perfection.
Burt is surprised to find out Valerie exists, since he didn't keep in touch with Val and Rhonda, and he's disturbed to find out that DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a United States Department of Defense agency - has an outpost set up right next to the research outpost. Mac believes DARPA is up to some "Area 51" stuff in the Arctic, and Burt buys into that too, theorizing that DARPA is responsible for this Graboid outbreak. Could they be experimenting on Graboids in an effort to turn them into bioweapons? I'll go ahead and say that the answer is no, Burt's paranoia about that is completely unwarranted and DARPA's presence there has nothing to do with the Graboids, they're assessing the purity of the ground water. The only thing they add to the film is more victims and a chance for Travis to get DARPA representative Mr. Cutts (Paul du Toit) to fix Burt's tax situation.
The real reason Graboids have emerged in the area is climate change. Not only is there a hot springs that's perfect for incubating the Graboid eggs laid by Ass-Blasters, but the Arctic is being hit by a heatwave that is melting the glaciers and thawing the permafrost, and Valerie theorizes the thaw has reactivated Graboids that have been dormant in the frozen ground since prehistoric times. She guesses that these Arctic Graboids may be the first Graboids that ever existed. The species would eventually migrate south and evolve, but they got their start in the Arctic. And it seems the South African Graboids were closer to the originals than the ones seen in the first four movies, since these "original Graboids" are just like the South African ones. Well, at least there's some sort of excuse for why the Graboids in this film might look and act differently than the Graboids we first saw.
The heatwave means that Burt and Travis were over-dressed; it's too hot for the Arctic camo outfit Burt put on. Since the land the outpost sits on is in the midst of ten square kilometers of thawed ground, that means the filmmakers didn't have to worry about adding snow around here, and also means that Graboids can come popping up at any time. And when there aren't Graboids grabbing people, our heroes have to deal with Ass-Blasters flying around. An interesting extra element to this situation comes from the fact that this area is called "the land of the midnight sun", as the sun never really sets. That means it's daylight throughout the entire movie, so it's impossible to tell how much time is passing. It feels like A Cold Day in Hell does take place in just one hectic day.
Bloodlines nearly included an action sequence that would have shown that Graboids are able to move through bodies of water as well as digging through the dirt. This movie toys with that as well, having a DARPA scientist get attacked while she's in a hot spring - but since the water only comes up to about waist level, it still can't be said that we've really seen aquatic Graboids.
Every movie in this franchise does reveal something new about the creatures, though, and this one is no different. Aftershocks introduced Shriekers, Back to Perfection introduced Ass-Blasters, The Legend Begins showed us baby Graboids, Bloodlines brought in South African Graboids with detachable tentacle tongues, and now the sixth film adds in the most ridiculous bit of new information. After collapsing and passing out during a monster attack, Burt wakes up to find that a large tapeworm had to be removed from his guts. It turns out that the tapeworm and the cerebral inflammation he's suffering from are symptoms of the fact that he has been infected by a hostile parasitic organism with an extremely slow gestation period. Once this parasite matures, it secretes a neurotoxin that will kill its host. How did Burt catch such an awful illness? Apparently it's the result of being swallowed by a Graboid in the third film. "Extremely slow gestation" is right; Back to Perfection was seventeen years before A Cold Day in Hell! I'm not into the idea of Graboids infecting people with parasites in the first place, but the fact that it took so long for the parasite to cause Burt any trouble is too much for me to buy into.
Since the toxin originates from Graboids, Burt's only hope is to be treated with antibodies extracted from a glandular sac in the throat of a live Graboid. So to save his dad's life, Travis has to figure out how to capture a Graboid. A good portion of the movie focuses on that, while our heroes try to wipe out the rest of the monsters in the area and the monsters try to wipe out the humans. Nods to the original Tremors are in abundance during this sequence. It's said that it will be difficult to escape from the area the outpost is in because it's in the middle of "total geographic isolation". Rita runs down a wood walkway with a Graboid chasing her beneath the walkway, reminiscent of a moment with Rhonda in the first movie. When the Graboid grabs her pants, Travis tells her to take them off, like Rhonda had to take her pants off in the first movie. Rita can't take her pants off because she doesn't wear underwear.
Bloodlines had an odd fascination with urine, featuring five moments of people and animals urinating and/or getting urine in their faces and mouths. Thankfully A Cold Day in Hell only features one moment of urination, and it combines the urine with a Tremors 1 reference. Stranded on a high structure with a Graboid beneath him, Hansen has to distract the Graboid so others can run to safety. He distracts it by pissing off the structure, sort of like Rhonda busting a pipe on the Perfection water tower to distract a Graboid back in the day.
The moment of urination does play into this film's pre-occupation with the male anatomy. While Hansen pees, Valerie uses her rifle scope to check out his penis. Dalkwed said Burt had a "well endowed" collection of weapons, and grabbed his own endowment while doing so. Burt hypes Freezze up by getting him to say he has record-breaking balls of steel. Swackhammer mocks Cutts' lack of balls. This movie is obsessed with dick and balls.
Anyway, we have a lot of instances of things from the original film being repeated here, but a more open reference to that movie comes when Travis admits that he has been in contact with Burt's ex-wife Heather, a character who was played by Reba McEntire and was only featured in the first movie (she was leaving him by the time Aftershocks came around), and she even gifted him with a weapon. I have always hoped that we'd actually get to see Burt and Heather interact again at some point, but it's nice to at least have her mentioned.
Amidst all the repetition, A Cold Day in Hell comes up with a new way to deal with Graboids when some of the characters seek shelter in a hangar that has a foundation of steel caissons drilled into the bedrock. Swackhammer uses a generator to send electricity into those caissons, creating an underground electric fence around the hangar. Burt and his cohorts turn up the voltage and trick a Graboid into frying itself like a mosquito slamming into a bug zapper. A nice, original kill, but the fun of it is quickly deflated when Burt celebrates by paraphrasing his most famous line from Tremors 1.
The most original thing A Cold Day in Hell has going for it is the method of capturing a live Graboid. Yes, Travis does figure out how to do that. Of course he does, since Burt returned for another sequel after this one.
In the end, this movie does remain my least favorite entry in the Tremors franchise to date - and it's not even a close competition between this one and any of the first four movies. For me, those four stand far above the fifth and sixth films in terms of quality. I don't think this one is terrible (although I might have said that it was a couple years ago), but it comes in under Bloodlines because it's packed with questionable writing, odd decisions, bland characters, a sick and overly grumpy Burt, and just doesn't feel inspired at all. It goes through the monster movie motions while hitting the viewer with a barrage of Tremors 1 homages that only serve to remind how much better these movies used to be. It took time and further viewings for me to get any entertainment from this sequel.
I was glad to get more Tremors, I just wish the Tremors I got this time had been better.
No comments:
Post a Comment