A Whole Lot of Quaking

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TREMORS Directed by Ron Underwood

Screenplay by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock

White sales, the first days of a New Year's-resolution diet, an entry in a magazine subscription sweepstakes: January is a month of small hopes. And of petty disappointments: you know that the queen-size percales are going to be sold out, that you are going to succumb to a chocolate fit and that Ed McMahon is not going to appear on the doorstep and hand you a million-dollar check.

In seasons past, Hollywood has not been as helpful as it might have been in lifting dulled spirits. Having hyped themselves into exhaustion with their holiday releases and feeling their annual Oscar anxiety beginning to build, the studios get the January blahs just like the rest of us. Here, have another helping of turkey hash.

This year, though, a youthful team of sci-fientists has brought out an antidepressant that actually works, because it stirs only cautious hopes for a couple of laughs and a few innocent thrills, then genially, inventively exceeds them. Its brand name is Tremors, and the curious thing about it is that it is based on an ancient formula, practically a folk remedy: a small isolated community is disturbed first by mysterious rumblings, then by alarming disappearances and deaths, after which large, smart, implacable creatures manifest themselves and desperate defenses are improvised by a cast that is not obviously wiser or braver than the average audience.

The featured creatures this time are gigantic earthworms, 30 ft. long, capable of comic-alarming subterranean rapid transit (you just see this furrow moving across the desert at Road Runner speed). When they surface, they reveal trifurcated tongues, each extension ending in a funny-nasty suction cup. In other words, they are great special effects, informed by the mutant-monster tradition of '50s horror movies but satirizing that tradition in a delicate way -- neither condescending nor indulgent.

The town they are terrorizing holds a meeting to name their antagonists, decides "graboids" will do nicely and starts dithering over defensive strategies. Perfection, Nev., by this time has a total population of nine, not counting the plucky visiting geologist (Finn Carter), but it has all the social stratums a movie needs to make funky, glancing social commentary, rather in the manner of a country-and-western song. The entire upper class is represented by a survivalist couple (well played by Michael Gross and Reba McEntire) eager to employ their expensive arsenal against something, anything. The middle class, all four of them, is variously unaware, unconcerned and unprepared for emergency. Populism being the operative spirit of this genre, it is up to Perfection's two-man lower class, Val and Earl (adorable Kevin Bacon and solid Fred Ward), to get their betters organized. They make their living doing odd jobs, bicker laconically, dream of urban glamour, can't imagine how to obtain it. But staring into a graboid's gaping mouth, they're the kind of guys -- resourceful, practical, unflappable -- you want on your side.

And for all those staring into an empty January evening, this is the kind of good basic movie everyone hopes is lurking out there and rarely is. Shrewdly, unpretentiously written, energetically directed and played with high comic conviction, Tremors is bound to become a cult classic.