Tremors/Awesome

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Val staring down an oncoming worm with steely resolve, and announcing to the world, "This bastard ain't smarter than us."

"CAN YOU FLY YOU SUCKER?"

  • Burt Gummer is one big walking CMoA, though his most defining moment is probably from the first film, when he and his wife Heather are attacked in their bunker by a Graboid. Listening on the radio the others hear Burt yell, "Jesus Christ!" and think it's all over...then a beat later, they hear gunshots echoing across the valley. Cut back to Burt and Heather going to town on the Graboid with their guns. They run out of ammo, and it looks like it's all over for real...then the camera pans over to the gigantic Wall of Weapons with Burt finally taking it down with an elephant gun. He comments "Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't you, you bastard?" Heather probably would be just as highly regarded if only Reba McEntyre hadn't cut ties with the franchise at that point.
  • While the basement scene could be regarded as Burt Gummer's most defining moment (in that he gives the term 'gun nut' a whole new meaning), This Troper firmly believes that his ultimate CMoA is his first encounter with the Shriekers in Tremors 2. We see several instances of the new Graboid mutation having jumped other characters and torn them apart with apparently little resistance. Then we get a brief cut to Burt getting ambushed by the things before cutting away again. The next morning Earl, Grady, and Kate have just survived a Shrieker attack when they hear an ominous rumbling from outside. Thinking it's a Graboid, they brace for another shootout. Instead, Burt's truck appears over the hill, torn completely to hell and half-covered in Shrieker guts. The truck grinds to a halt and Burt steps out, his clothes ripped and covered from head to toe in Shrieker guts, but he is not only alive to tell the tale of fighting off roughly two dozen Shriekers singlehandedly, he doesn't even have a single visible injury to show for the experience. The group asks him if he's all right, and Burt proceeds to deliver what might be the single most awesome line in the entire series:

"I feel I was denied critical...need-to-know...information."

    • Burt then follows this up with an explanation of how he survived such an assault:

"Well, when the radios went down I decided to return to the refinery, but en route, I find I'M IN AN AMBUSH SITUATION! Must have been a couple dozen of these things! Well, I dropped the first wave with semi-auto fire, but they just kept on coming. Sheer luck most of them were in front of the truck, so I just popped it into six-wheel and ran 'em down. The ones that got on board I handled with a combination of small-arms fire and hand-to-hand techniques. [pulls out two pistols] I am completely. Out. Of ammo. [Beat] That's never happened to me before."

    • Doubles as a CMOF. The combination of Michael Gross's delivery and the hilarious lines make it one of the funniest scenes in the franchise. It must be seen to be appreciated. Here.
    • Oh, it gets better. He captured one of them alive. By beating it into submission with his bare hands, and then tying it up and throwing it in the back of his truck.
  • Also, he's the ONLY person in the ENTIRE FRANCHISE to actually be eaten by a Graboid and SURVIVE.
  • Tecopa from Tremors 4 may have been a one-film character with a scant handful of lines, yet he managed to deduce one of the Graboids' key weaknesses (collisions) and bait one into a fatal headache. And apparently does so on the fly, in less than a minute!