Burt Gummer, the graboid hunter played by Michael Gross in five Tremors movies, a short-lived TV series, and a video game, is running for President. The character announced his candidacy in the 2020 election via a short video in which he questioned the fitness of everyone already running for the job and, among other things, promised that if elected, he will boycott Washington and run the country from an underground bunker in an undisclosed location. The video is the latest in a series of guerilla-style videos feature Gummer and used to promote the releases of Universal’s Tremors sequels in recent years.
Videos by ComicBook.com
During the video, Gummer says that he is founding his own party and running for President because “Politicians are for the most part a group of abject, craven, opportunistic, mentally-challenged invertebrates.” of course, he means no disrepect…to mollusks, arthropods, and the like.
You can see it below.
Before the release of Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, Gross appeared in a video in which Gummer summarized the events of the previous five films — including Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, in which Gross appeared…but played an ancestor of Gummer’s, since the movie took place in the Old West. Somehow Burt apparently eventually got that story down.
“For over four decades, what I do for a living is pretend. Is there a part of me that exists from which I borrow Burt? Yes, there’s a part of me, a certain obsessive compulsiveness about little things. I’m a compulsive recycler, and stuff like this; I have a little OCD in me,” Gross told ComicBook.com. “Burt is comically obsessive compulsive. Burt goes to the extremes. I’ve taken a little bit of who I am for Burt Gummer; I have my bizarre parts. What you do is you take these little things that you know about yourself and take them to extremes. But I feel entirely comfortable playing Burt, just because he’s comic gold. What a great place to go. It’s a writer’s gift to have a character like this who goes to such extremes. Comedy is about imbalance, people who are out of balance. Literally, when they lose their balance and fall on a banana peel, but also out of balance just personally and psychologically. Burt is nothing if not out of balance, and that’s what I love about him.”
In the first Tremors movie, in which Kevin Bacon played the lead character, Gross’s Gummer appeared as a kooky side character, along with his gun-toting wife played by Reba McIntire. In the second film, Gummer (and another supporting character from the first movie, played by Fred Ward) replaced Bacon as the film’s lead, with Ward leaving and Gross becoming the sole face of the franchise shortly thereafter.
You can check out the film’s synopsis below.
“When a nature preserve in the Solomon Islands is infiltrated by Graboids, Ass Blasters, and Shriekers, two of the preserve’s top scientists recruit Burt Gummer (Michael Gross), monster hunter extraordinaire, to eradicate the infestation. While there, Burt picks up a potential new protégé and encounters lost love.”
The film, written by Brian Brightly and directed by Don Michael Paul (who helmed the last two installments), features a cast that includes Richard Brake, Jon Heder, Caroline Langrishe, Jackie Cruz, Cassie Clare, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Matthew Douglas, and more.
