Tremors 4: The Legend Begins Review

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins premiered on the Sci-fi channel on January 2, 2004. As always, we begin with how the movie was advertised. The trailer to this film was a vast improvement on the Tremors 3 trailer, however that does not mean it was a good trailer. The narrator is very distracting. It's demanding menace from the vocal actor as opposed to the visuals that are actually shown.

As for the film itself, it's a lot better than Tremors 3, I'll give it that. The character development ROCKS in this film. Watching Michael Gross take Burt's great-grandfather from a man who can barely stand up for himself to being the gun loving man we know in Burt was fascinating and it was all to save his friends. What an accomplishment! For the first time, it seems like the main character has an ark. You can argue that Val has an arc in Tremors, but it's definitely not as profound or big as Hiram's in Tremors 4.

We're back to primarily puppetry, which is a vast improvement over Tremors 3 and the TV series as well. Puppetry makes movies like this. I can almost guarantee that it's much easier to forgive an outdated anamatronic creature that's physically there on set than to forgive outdated CGI. Think about it: compare the effects in Jaws compared to Jurassic Park. Case and point. The other great thing about going back to primarily puppetry is that the franchise owners actually listen to their fans...imagine that.

Now for the negative: trying to make the grabboid scary again is a very hard task. That creature has been so overexposed it's unbelievable. The TV series didn't help it's scare factor either. This film does an admirable job, but it doesn't quite make the cut. Also, a major problem for the film, aside from Burt not too many other characters actually change. The film's biggest offense is that it's an incredibly boring watch. The focus on the main character puts less focus on the creature. The fact that we know about the creature and how to defeat it and that we have to sit and watch these characters rediscover it, it just doesn't flow for a series like Tremors that was so much smarter in their first two entries.

Here's another major problem: the actors on the making of say that this is the first graboids. That completely contradicts what was set up in the second film saying that they were Precambrian, or thousands of years old. Wow, great job writers! Another problem is that there's no surprises in this film aside from how Hiram acts and that gets old very quick.

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins got better reviews than the third movie, but it wasn't successful enough to warrant another entry. To date, this is the final entry in the Tremors franchise. There for a while was to be a rumored fifth installment, but that died. Stampede Entertainment, the makers of the films even took down the IMDB page of it.

This final film is ok, better characterization, worse creature feature. It depends on what your cup of tea is ultimately. If I wasn't a die hard, I would stop after the second film.