It was in the old section that I a Friday afternoon first discovered the film Tremors 2: Aftershocks (no, it wasn't even the first one). Me and a friend decided right away that this looked promising enough for a watch, and it was even on DVD (!), meaning there would most likely not be any artifacts. I think I ended up watching the films thrice that weekend, it was just so fun and different from anything else I had watched up to that point. My friend at the time was deeply into monster films, horror films, and splatter films, but I was more mainstream with my love for just plain old action and comedy films. This was the first time I watched anything with that kind of gore and horror, and it was coupled with the type of comedy I had learned to love from other films. Of course we understood that since this was titled Tremors 2 there had to be at least one other film out there, but we never found it at the video store. It was many more years before I re-discovered the series at a dollar shop on my way to the family cabin. There were two DVD-sets on the shelf that I instantly recognised. One had Tremors and Tremors 2 written on it, and the other Tremors 3 and Tremors 4. There were four films! Two more than I had ever even known about. I managed to convince my parents that I really needed those films, that they were all I had ever wanted, and that weekend I watched all of them as fast as I possibly could. They were all so amazing. I just loved them. Each of them was like the last one, just even wackier and crazy. They had truly managed to make a building franchise that didn't really feel stale. (Of course I would later find out that I was one of very few people with that mindset, but that wouldn't stop me loving them). A few years later I even learned there was a TV series, and a few years after that I got to watch that series. But then it was over. There was nothing more to watch.
Nowadays you'd probably be lucky if you found anyone who knew anything about the Tremors franchise beyond the first film. Most people would go "the first one is okay, the other ones sound stupid". There's a small online community still somewhat active. If you call one post every other year active, but that's about it. What was just a few years ago a growing community with several "high-profile" fan websites and constant activity has more or less grown dormant. The biggest news in the fandom are when one of the writers publishes a new book, and even those aren't pulling in the posters these days. So the timing of this new news is really odd.
Actor/director Don Michael Paul (director of a Taken rip-off named Taken, and some sequels to some films you heard of once in passing) has posted on his blog that he's doing a reboot of Tremors for Universal. It's supposed to film in Johannesburg, South Africa after he's finished a film that there almost isn't any online information about. Looking over this director's IMDB page isn't exactly inspiring. There's nothing worthy of note there, except that it seems he's become Universal's go-to-guy for shitty genre films that pleases some niche market. Which, honestly, doesn't bode too well for this reboot.
Sure, no one is praising Tremors 2-4 for their brilliance in cinema. No one is deluded enough to think that they should've won any big awards, or are worthy of love from everyone. But most agree that at least the first film is a "proper" one. It's a genuine monster horror comedy, a genre that we see very rarely done with any respect today. The biggest studio upholding it is perhaps The Asylum, but they make their films more spoofs than anything.
What I really don't get is how Universal figures Tremors is ready for a reboot at all. We're at an all-time low in terms of popularity, mostly because Universal has been slow with realising what the fans want (the DVD set of the TV series took seven years to be released). Not to mention the fact that most fans know that there exists a written Tremors 5 script. We've heard all about it, and it's written by the original writer, meaning it's at least going to have some of the same charm and feeling as the four films prior. But instead we get a whole new reboot. Straight-to-DVD by a director who's no one ever heard about despite his many classic films. They could have just as easily, if not more so, made the film a stand-alone. The series has already established that graboids (the monsters of the series) exist at least in the entirety of the Americas, and the fact that they've been around for so long mean they're most likely present on all other continents as well. There's nothing stopping Universal from just moving the setting to another country, with new characters, and just have some off comment about them actually having heard of graboids before. They don't need to be experts about them, they don't need to know how to defeat them, they just need to have heard of them. "Oh yeah, I think I've heard of these things. They're called graboids."
Bottomline, Universal. Just come to me. Let me work this story out. You can let this Don Michael guy direct it for all I care, just let me, a fan of the series, make sure it isn't a complete waste of your time. You're clearly not looking for any specific new fan demographic, let's make sure it at the very least panders to the original one. Thank you.
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