For thirty years, the Tremors franchise has pitted everyday people (well, everyday people and one survivalist lunatic named Burt Gummer) against a battery of creatures descended from prehistoric, subterranean sandworm-type creatures called Graboids. The seventh installment in the franchise, Tremors: Shrieker Island, brings back the shriekers — a variation of Graboid not seen since Tremors: The Series on Syfy nearly 20 years ago. It also introduces a few new ideas, like trophy hunters who breed graboids to sell an “experience” to rich tourists and a massive “queen” graboid they compare in size and power to Godzilla. Every horror movie is bound to have a few fatalties, and Tremors: Shrieker Island is no different, but as the franchise has built toward a more personal story for Burt, deaths have become more “real.”
In the fifth film, Burt discovered that he has a long-lost son, Travis (Jamie Kennedy), who played a key role in that movie and its follow-up. In the seventh, Travis is gone, but the Jas (Caroline Langrishe), Travis’s mother and the only woman besides Heather (Reba McIntire, who only appeared in the first movie) that we know ever connected with Burt, joins the cast.
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Needless to say, that ups the stakes.
Spoilers ahead for Tremors: Shrieker Island, out today.
In the last big battle of the film, Burt leads his ragtag team of heroes against the graboid queen. Trapped on an island with no firearms and few explosives, Burt finds himself having to improvise, and he ultimately is struck by a bolt of inspiration.
Like Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) in the original Tremors, Burt managed to trick the queen into chasing him to the edge of a massive gorge, where she bursts through a cliff wall and falls to her death on jagged rocks below.
As the queen leaps over Burt, he flips the monster off, leaping aside as she burrows past the spot where he used to be — and disappearing. It appears from the shot that Burt was taken over the edge of the cliff with the queen, and the audience never sees him again in the film.
After thirty years and various new species of monsters that Burt has hunted alongside dozens of compatriots, he seems to have died in what may be the only fitting way: one-on-one with a graboid.
The film ends with Jas and Burt’s new companions Jimmy (Jon Heder) and Freddie (Jackie Cruz) setting up a small memorial to Gummer, setting his baseball cap and a pair of aviator sunglasses on top of it. The glasses, ironically enough, belonged to Jas, but Burt borrowed them and later joked that she would “inherit” them back them if he died.
For fans wondering whether it’s a “real” death or not — and we have an interview coming soon with Gross that addresses that issue directly — it certainly seems to be. There’s no post-credits scene, no indication that Burt is ready to creep back into frame, and the closing credits are a montage of Gross’s best moments from throughout all seven movies.
Tremors: Shrieker Island — which may now be the conclusion of the franchise as fans have known it for 30 years — is now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and on demand.
