Leviathan (1989)

Released at the tail end of the eighties, Leviathan followed a string of major projects for Stan Winston—he had worked with Rob Bottin on The Thing, and after opening Stan Winston Studio, crafted the effects for The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator (as well as Invaders From Mars and Pumpkinhead), establishing that team to be the top studio for creature effects in Hollywood. Winston himself was well past his Gargoyles mask-masking days, acting as Producer of Creature Effects alongside his crew, including Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (the latter once again tasked with wearing the monster suit), who would move on to Tremors immediately after this. With those in mind, one can’t help but look at Leviathan as a victory lap, the kind of movie that these people could make in their sleep. It doesn’t change the game like Stan Winston Studios prior projects, but it allows them another chance to show why they got those earlier movies in the first place.

Tremors (1990)

Big Hollywood studios have a hot-and-cold relationship with monster movies—they’ll cede that territory to B-movie productions for years, or decades, at a time, and then start investing some bigger budgets into a select few before dropping the whole thing again. The nineties was one of those periods with a minor streak of classic-style creature features—”classic-style” in the sense that they’re more or less following the structures that were laid down in the fifties. Their special effects may be more sophisticated, the dialogue less stiff and expository, and the violence more explicit, but in the end it’s still a movie where a group of people have to deal with the sudden appearance of a monster or monsters, and the expected plot beats are barely changed, even after forty years.

Tremors, which could be considered the first in that wave, wasn’t a significant success in its original release, and likely accrued its cult following through home video and TV airings, leading it to become a direct-to-video franchise with a surprising amount of longevity (as in, it’s most recent sequel came out in 2020)—it even had a short-lived TV show, and a more recent series attempt that wasn’t picked up. Technically, it’s also an end-of-the-eighties movie that was delayed into the dead early months of 1990, just like Nightbreed, making it something of a liminal artifact. Looking at it now, you can see how it heralds some of the ways the subsequent decade of monster movies attempted to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, some minor tweaks in presentation likely meant to pull in new audiences—while Tremors and what followed tended to resemble the old school entries in basic plotting, they change just enough of the surface details to make themselves feel contemporary, with a particular emphasis on comedy.