How to Beat the SHRIEKERS in TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND

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If you were the last line of defense against a GRABOID INVASION of Asia, what would you do? Imagine a billionaire moved in next door to you and opened a free range tiger hunting park for other rich idiots. Now imagine instead of tigers, it’s a subterranean species of man-eating monsters that evolves like a pokemon into a velociraptor and eventually into a pterodactyl. Sounds awesome…unless you’re on the menu. If you’re part of the isolated research team in Thailand at risk of being eaten, you call in the big guns to handle your monster problem before it gets out of hand. Fortunately for the team, this time, they have us on their side. I’m going to break down the mistakes made by the hunters and research team, try to make better decisions and ultimately attempt to beat the SHRIEKERS in TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND. These hunters are about to become the hunted. In a Thai jungle, a kid parkours his way to a clearing where a group of American big game hunters lay in wait. As he steps into view, they aim their guns and activate special poison dart ammo. Something roars into the clearing after the kid. A massive Graboid breaks the surface of the earth like a breaching megalodon and the hunters open fire with heavy artillery. When the hunt ends empty handed, Bill assures the group they’ll bag their trophy tomorrow. His second in command, Anna, doesn’t want to continue the hunt. She warns Bill that this isn’t like their other jobs. The predators they’ve come to hunt on this island were genetically modified. At least when they were hunting lions and bears, they met on an even playing field. Bill’s too blinded by pride and adrenaline to back down. This hunt is doomed…and not just because they brought bows and arrows and pea shooters to a monster hunt. At this point in the lore of graboids, the entire world knows of their existence. They’re well documented animals with known biology and life cycles. Teams of people have had dangerous encounters with them before. And better hunters than Bill have tried to use guns and barely survived. Back in Nevada, Val, Earl and the residents of Perfection learned to stay off the ground and eventually take shelter on giant boulders to keep out of the graboids’ reach. You may be saying, “sure, but those were local yokels and these are big game hunters” and I would tell you EXACTLY. Why are Bill and his crew messing this up worse than a bunch of unarmed civilians playing the floor is lava in the Nevada desert? If Bill and his hunters actually want to kill anything this century, they should be up off the ground, in tree house bases or on elevated watchtowers like Ewoks. And they should all be packing better weaponry than this. I count hunting rifles, elephant guns, and a mini gun here. The rifles and elephant guns would be great against a terrestrial predator, but they’re barely better than worthless against a subterranean ambush predator with armored skin protected by compacted earth. Only rapid consistent penetrating rounds are going to kill this thing, so bolt action rifles aren’t going to be effective. For a graboid, they would have been better off going for an M82A2, a 50 BMG that was built to shoot at helicopters, nuke car engines, and dismember soviet extremists from half a mile away. Or the GM6 Lynx, a shoulder fireable 50 BMG. The rounds from these guns hit with enough force to penetrate 24 inches into the ground, meaning they can be fired whenever the graboid is running close to the surface. The minigun might be a practical weapon, if it was mounted to a reinforced base. The minigun averages 50 rounds a second. A single 7.62mm round generates 3,500 J of force. So in one second you are hit with 175,000 J of force. That is equivalent to 130,000 foot-pounds of force. There are youtube videos of people shooting them but you will notice it is in extremely short bursts and super inaccurate. It would have been more effective to have the parkour kid lure the worm into a narrow area with hunters on elevated platforms to either side, firing at a 45 degree angle into the worm as it advances. From this position, the only means of escape for the graboid would be to dive, which would still expose its body for long enough to do serious damage with big guns. Hell, these guys are rich – if they want a show, they should splurge on a few Cambodian RPG’s too. On the mainland, a conservation group led by Dr. Jazz Welker and hungover Napoleon Dynamite tags a herd of Asian Elephants. Jazz spots Bill’s hunting party heading for the AVEX-BIO Private Island 1.2 kilometers off shore. Jazz, Jimmy and Ishiman shuttle over to the island and discover the carcass of a Graboid in the jungle. Giant orange holes suggest something from inside tore its way out. Jazz says that what’s left of the carcass is an exoskeleton and Jimmy tells us it had dorsal convex dermal armor plating. Suddenly, creatures begin to circle them. A shriek breaks the silence. Jimmy tells everyone to run. Halfway to the boat, Ishi stops, realizing he’s surrounded. A bipedal shrieker appears behind him. Ishi twirls his machete, ready to defend himself, when a second shrieker blindsides him. Jimmy grabs his arm, but the shrieker drags Ishi away. Ishi’s death is just as much Jazz’s fault as it is the snobby billionaires who came here to hunt these monsters. Jazz’s team has been picking up seismic activity from her camp, she’s had encounters with graboids before, she knew Bill was a psycho with a history of hunting big game impress other rich idiots, and she saw they were armed to the freakin teeth while approaching this island. If you’re going to trespass on someone else’s private island in search of illegal poaching or gaming hunting, bring weapons and a camera so, you know, you can record evidence of illegal activity. Better yet, if you think it’s graboids before you even get there, bring a boom box and idle the ship off shore while playing bad pop music until you see the telltale dirt spouts of a graboid moving in the ground. Record that and call the World Wildlife Federation or Green Peace and go full PETA on Bill’s ass. Wild predators hunt using a variety of tactics. Some ambush. Some are persistence predators who wear their prey down. Some, like the tiger, like to chase fleeing prey. No matter how they hunt, your best bet against them isn’t to turn tail and run. Instead, back away slowly and make loud, deep noises to avoid appearing submissive or weak. If you have a weapon like Ishi’s machete, have it ready in your hand. Continually move toward your means of escape or protection. If you find yourself surrounded, look for a high tree to climb. And if your buddy gets ambushed, make the best of their sacrifice and get out of there. Jazz and Jimmy make it back to the mainland. Jazz tells Jimmy he needs to track down Burt Gummer – yes, the OG Graboid slayer from the Nevada desert – and bring him back to handle the situation. Jimmy takes off for a remote island in Papua New Guinea to find him. One false move on the beach and one of Burt’s traps snares Jimmy like a wild boar. Burt appears with a four pronged pinning spear and cuts Jimmy down. Burt’s deep into his Cast Away roleplay, eating grubs and ranting about government sanitation from his tax free waterfront beach property. Jimmy convinces him to help with their graboid problem, warning that there are 800 people and a research team living within the island’s kill zone. Back with the hunting party, the Elon Musk wannabes are measuring wallets. One guy bets another that Anna can’t hit a bullseye with an arrow from across the river. She ups the bet and offers to shoot an apple off his head, while looking in a mirror facing the opposite way. The trick’s clearly old hat to her and she nails it in style. Jazz arrives to ruin Bill’s day. He admits to flying in four graboids to the island for this rich boy sports hunting extravaganza and reassures her they’ll all be dead by the end of the weekend. She corrects him, saying that one of the graboids is already dead. She tells him to call off the hunt or she’ll report him to the World Wildlife Federation. He tells her he’s jammed the entire area’s communication network until the hunt is over. At night a storm sweeps over the island and a drunken trust funder wearing a scarf in 90 degree weather wanders into the jungle to relieve himself. A noise sends him running. The drunk locks himself inside an outhouse. The creature scratches at the wall before it grabs Richie Rich and yanks him into the septic tank. This is why no amount of money could convince me to take a bunch of poser businessmen hunting an aggressive species. None of them has done the slightest bit of research before coming on this trip and that hubris is going to get them all killed. A skilled game hunter learns the ways of his prey in order to kill it. And a skilled leader of game hunters makes sure his paying customers don’t become their prey’s lunch. Bill brags repeatedly about manipulating the graboid genome of the eggs he flew to the island, but he never once thought to preemptively inject the worms with an explosive or corrosive tag when they were still small, or edit the genes that trigger the final stage of their evolution. Graboid biology has been studied for 30 years at this point – you would think these weekend warriors would at least know the general behavior of the species they’re stalking. If Bill were smart, he’d see Jazz’s interruption as a lucky accident and at the very least ply her for information about the graboids before starting the hunt. As for Jazz, I honestly don’t know if she actually wants to stop a graboid invasion of Asia or just let Bill die for his arrogance. She knows at least one graboid has spawned shriekers already and she knows what happens after shriekers evolve into their final form, but she doesn’t tell Bill any of this here. Maybe she assumes he already knows, but that is a bold mistake for a conservationist to make. Even though Bill’s base camp is on the mainland away from Shrieker Island, it should have a security detail walking the perimeter at all times, as well as seismic and thermal detection systems monitoring the surrounding jungle. And this guy pees in the jungle only to end up taking shelter in an outhouse anyway. If he had been of sound mind, and, ya know, done any research whatsoever, he might have climbed onto the outhouse roof instead of barricading himself inside. Because this creature pulls him underground, it’s most likely a graboid and not a shrieker, meaning the best place to be is off the floor. Once on the roof, he could have screamed for help from the heavily armed men partying only a few meters away. Burt arrives in Thailand with his very own mini documentary detailing his extensive history with the graboids. The infomercial sums up the monster’s biology with a nifty little cartoon – the graboid lives underground and hunts by sensing seismic activity on the surface. It pulls its prey into its mouth using three eel like tongues. Its next development stage begins when it spawns three blind bipedal young called Shriekers that hunt with infrared sensors. For some reason, the video doesn’t detail the final and most dangerous stage of the graboid’s evolution, which we’ll get to in a minute. Just as Burt begins his address to the research team in person, he’s interrupted by Bill and Anna. Burt zeros in on the rifle Bill’s carrying – a Weatherby 308 with a biometric fingerprint trigger lock. Burt points out that using it on a graboid would be about as effective as spitting at Godzilla. Bill warns Burt to behave himself and leaves. Burt tells the research team they need to collect their weaponry…unfortunately they don’t have any. Jimmy takes him to a World War 2 bomb shelter to show him what they DO have. Knives, steel machetes, and a M2 flamethrower good at 30 meters. Jimmy swings around a crate of sweating dynamite. Freddie volunteers to use it to create a parameter defense against the graboids, saying it might not kill them but it’ll at least sound the alarm. On the beach, Freddie also brings a bird in a cage to use as an early warning system for danger, as well as the only rifle they have, for which they only have tranquilizing tracker darts. Gun measuring contests aside, this is the point in the story where we HAVE to mention the most boring strategy of them all…and that’s going for reinforcements. Burt’s an awesome addition to the team, but no match for the raw power of armed soldiers or police. Bill may have cut off communication with their location, but the research team has a boat which they could use to quickly shuttle to a mainland military or police base and warn them about the graboid infestation on the island. Again, people have known about graboids for 30 years at this point. This isn’t like someone wandering into town claiming they saw bigfoot – he’s busy fighting wendigos in upstate New York. This is a credible threat that a military base would definitely take seriously. As for the paltry weapons they DO have, well, we have to burst your bubble again and point out that dynamite is simply the explosive nitroglycerin stabilized by clay. Dynamite has a shelf life of around 6 months before the nitroglycerin begins to decompose and sweat out into the container holding the dynamite. These bang sticks are 80 years old, so by this point, the dynamite might not explode at all. Even if they DO explode, blowing them up inside a bunker that Jimmy tells us was designed to withstand nuclear explosions isn’t going to kill the queen. It’s just going to scare her off. Ultimately, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here – we’re trying to kill a giant maneating armor plated worm. Back in Nevada, Burt, Val and Earl used the pipe bomb technique to kill graboids by dragging lit dynamite along the ground until the graboid swallowed it and then blew up. He should do that here too. It’s safer, more dangerous to the worm, AND allows them to try again and again with individual sticks of dynamite rather than blowing their whole load at once. On Shrieker Island, Bill’s hunting party hikes for high ground listening to shrieks in the jungle they want to believe are monkeys. Some of the party are drunk, others out of shape. All are gunning for a mounted Graboid skull on their office wall, completely oblivious to the shriekers stalking them via their built in thermal vision. Anna’s forced to play babysitter for a drunk wall street punk who’s being stalked by shriekers. At the edge of a clearing, their hike is halted by movement in the brush, which turns out to be birds. Meanwhile, Burt, Freddie and Jimmy arrive to the carcass of the graboid. Burt warns them that now that three shriekers have emerged from the body, they’ll gorge on protein for two to five days before molting into their final pokemon flying form, which is called an ass blaster. If they can’t kill the graboids and shriekers before they become airborne, the monsters will leave the island and take over Asia. This is why people die, Burt. Because you bury the important part until you’re standing on top of a nest of graboids and shriekers. The fact that these things metamorphosize into the world’s ugliest carnivorous butterflies should have been the first thing you mentioned, back on the mainland. More importantly, they knew before leaving for this expedition that the graboids hunt by seismic movement and the shriekers hunt by infrared tracking. It’s very possible that they could have prepared traps for both forms of the graboids before they ever actually set foot on the island. To kill the graboids, they could circle the island to look for boulder outcroppings, then rig a sound and movement trap to use the pipe bomb technique to kill them. For the shriekers, they could build a fire to lure them in with the heat signature before Burt blasts them all with his flamethrower. Better yet, go to Bill’s unguarded camp after they’ve left to scavenge for guns they couldn’t carry, then pull the boat up along the island’s shore line waving a flare or giant torch to draw the shriekers’ attention and then pick them off from the safety of their boat with a sniper shot to the back of their throats. The other way to sneak up on shriekers would be to look for plastic paneling in the camps that they could hold up in front of themselves as thermal shields. When viewed through thermal imaging, plastic disperses thermal radiation, obscuring the human living form behind it and making it simply look like a giant burning red rectangle, a shape which would likely confuse the creatures long enough to get them focused on something else OR fire off a shot into their soft palette. And of course, it’s not the most environmentally friendly way, but setting the island on fire is a great last resort scorched earth option. Back with Bill’s hunting party, they don’t know about the graboid’s life cycle or that the shriekers can hunt via heat signature. They unknowingly loses a straggler as a shrieker attacks the drunk wall street punk without anyone noticing. In a clearing, the party becomes surrounded as the graboids speak to each other. Anna warns Bill they’ve lost a party member, but he’s not fazed. Suddenly, four shriekers converge on the group. These ugly suckers are built like skeletal pig goblins. They shriek, causing head splitting disorientation for the party. The shriekers easily pick off three hunters. Mohawk fights back with his mini gun, but the shrieks overpower him too. They’re saved at the last second by Burt and his flamethrower. He kills one and scares the other three away, but not before Freddie darts one with a tracker. It’s almost like these posers WANT to feed themselves to the graboids. This hunting party has nine members and none of them notice one of their own getting picked off feet behind them. And they barely bat an eye when they’re suddenly surrounded and the creatures begin to use bioacoustics to communicate with one another. Did none of these losers watch Jurassic Park? The moment a predator species starts talking, this hunting party should rally its defenses, creating a tight circle with their backs to each other, prepared for an oncoming attack. From this formation, it would have been impossible for the shriekers to ambush them and hunters could have worked in pairs or trios to take down individual shriekers. Working as teams would have also allowed them to pool their resources and minimize their liabilities…like Mohawk with his minigun, which he fires wildly and with little accuracy. Since only one shot needs to hit home in order to kill each shrieker, concentrated fire from three rookies like this should overpower the animals quickly and efficiently. And if they had done any research at all, they would have known about the shriekers’ heat seeking vision. They could have brought flares with them to create visual confusion and distract them long enough to fire their weapons. The shrieker’s super sonic attack seems to be just one of the mutations caused by Bill’s genetic meddling, so there’s little they could have done about that without ear protection, which they definitely should have been wearing when on a hunt with a guy armed with a minigun. Had they all been wearing Gucci ear pro, the shriekers sonic attack wouldn’t have disoriented and they’d have been able to return accurate fire. After the shriekers are gone, Bill warns everyone to stop moving, pointing out that the clearing is the perfect place for graboids to wait to ambush prey. Burt learns that not only did Bill hatch four graboids on the island, but that he enhanced them with stem cells and edited their genome to increase their predatory instincts. Burt prepares to distract the graboid, using the flamethrower as an explosive, but before he can, Mohawk is yanked underground with his minigun. Burt throws the flamethrower and Anna shoots it as the graboid bears down on it. Chunks of flesh rain down across the killing field as the group races for the boat. That’s a second graboid down, with two to go. Shooting the tank like this is a bit of movie fun that’ll likely get you killed if you ever try it in real life. Even if a 9mm could penetrate the fuel tank on that flamethrower, there still needs to be an ignition source to help it catch fire…which they might have had if Burt had thought to bring a couple sticks of dynamite with them to use as pipe bombs or percussive distractions. Honestly, since Bill refuses to listen the wisdom and experience of a guy with a 30 year history of hunting graboids, I’d say let him run, let him be the distraction we use to run in the opposite direction, back toward the safety of the boat. He opened this can of worms, let him lie in it. Back on the mainland, Jazz gives the group bad news. One of their 11,000 pound bull elephants suddenly disappeared. She tracked his gps tracker to a 19 meter long mass that weighs 20 tons located 37 meters BELOW the surface. A giant genetically modified graboid somehow escaped the island and is only 1000 meters away under Bill’s camp. Burt says it’s impossible – graboids can’t swim and they aren’t big enough to eat elephants. But the data doesn’t lie. Bill interrupts and tells them they’re returning to finish the hunt, even if he’s a few men short. Burt tells him he’s in over his head and refuses to get out of his way. Bill has one of his men shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. This is like that final handshake showdown in Django Unchained, only even dumber. If Bill wants to risk death to continue the hunt, let him. At worst, he reduces the number of beasts we have to fight. At best, he becomes lunch and gets out of our way while we strategize our next move. Wagging a moral finger here doesn’t do anybody any good. Burt’s only lucky Bill hit him with a tranq instead of a good old fashioned bullet. The strategy here is - don’t anger the idiot glamping hunters. Wait till they leave and fix the radio to call for military support or send someone off in the boat to the nearest base with firebombing and bunker busting equipment. After nightfall, Bill’s camp is on high alert. A noise in the jungle sparks an all out warzone shoot out. Heavy caliber machine gun shells rain down over the camp. Unfortunately, the hunters aim with about as much accuracy as a blind man trying to take a leak. Something grabs one of the hunters and yanks him out of sight. Another hunter named Doc tries to make a break for it as Anna fires two flares into the sky to give them some visibility. Doc trips and comes face to face with a behemoth graboid. The hunters are awestruck…until they realize the giant is essentially using its tail as a lure while the rest of it moves in from behind and devours Doc whole. Anna tells Bill they have to stop the hunt, but he refuses and she resigns and runs off into the night. Meanwhile, Burt and the rest of the research team are tied up with zip ties in the bunker. Burt tells them they’ll need a knife to cut through the ties – Jimmy tells Burt that the shoes he borrowed have 550 paracord instead of shoelaces, which he can use as a friction saw. Burt doesn’t need to be told twice. He saws through the zip ties on his wrists, then helps the others. Unfortunately, they realize the bunker has been locked from the outside. There’s suddenly a noise and the door opens. Anna has arrived to let them out and offer them her help to stop the Queen graboid. Something big rams the bunker – Anna accidentally led the queen right to them. Everyone freezes, but the generator suddenly kicks on. The group devises a trap for the queen. They gather the remaining dynamite into bundles and lay them out in the bunker. Anna turns on the generator, flooding the space with noise. The queen graboid begins ramming the bunker. Burt tosses a lit stick of dynamite and the group races outside as the rest of the stash explodes. It’s a great convenience that Jimmy learned from the best and replaced his shoelaces with paracord that they can use to cut through zip ties. If you’re NOT walking around with paracord on your shoes, the easiest way to break zip ties is by using a method I’ve shown you before for how to get out of duct tape. As counterintuitive as it may sound, when you’re bound at the wrist with zip ties, you want to tighten them as tightly around your wrists as possible. Use your teeth to makes it so tight your wrists are practically laying against one another. Then, in one quick, sweeping motion lift your arms high above your head, then yank your arms down past your stomach, almost like you’re trying touch elbows behind your back. This should break the zip ties. You guys should be experts at this by now. While blowing up the bunker looks cool, it’s massive overkill and a huge waste of their remaining supplies. Jimmy says this bunker was built to withstand nuclear explosions, but he also says it was built for the fighting in World War 2. Since nuclear weapons weren’t built till the end of the war, I’d say Jimmy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Even if it wouldn’t withstand a nuclear explosion, it WOULD likely contain the explosion from a few sticks of dynamite. The energy would likely escape through the easiest route, which is the door, with damage contained to the bunker interior and nothing done to the worm outside. All this is is a massive sound attack to drive the worm away. Instead, they should rig a single crate of explosives with a long fuse by the open front door and fish for graboid tentacles by banging on the ground with a stick until a tentacle pops up and grabs the crate. Then, we could simply light the fuse and wait for the nitro still left in the dynamite or the nitro that’s seeped into the crate to ignite. The other option would be to LET the graboid break through the bunker wall, much like the worm did to Burt’s basement wall all those years ago. In that position, the worm would likely be stuck and struggle to maneuver backward into the ground where it can move freely. At that point, everyone could move outside and a pipe bomb could be thrown into its open mouth. The next morning, Bill’s last remaining hunter Mr. Bowtie wants to call it a day, but Bill’s too pot committed – and insane – to stop things now. He tells the hunter to meet him by the riverbank. Back with Burt, they’re rigging their defense line of additional dynamite when Freddie tells him the GPS on the queen graboid says it returned to Bill’s camp. Burt races over to find the last hunter being dragged into the river by the queen while Bill peppers its armor plated hide with small caliber bullets. Burt tries to talk sense into Bill, but he’s too far gone. He fires wildly into the water, telling the Queen exactly where he is. She reaches one wiley tentacle through the bridge from below and easily claims his two hundred pounds of flesh. Pity Bowtie isn’t a real survivalist; he might actually have stood a chance surviving this attack, by pulling a secondary weapon and firing or slicing into the graboid’s sensitive mouth area. Pity still that he’s got Crazy Bill doing jack all to help him. Bill should know his shots to the armor plated exoskeleton of this beast aren’t doing anything. With the graboid distracted, he should be standing up the slope in front of Bowtie firing shots into the beast’s mouth. Bill may just be too far gone at this point. But let’s not forget about Burt – there’s no way he should have shown up empty handed to this melee fight. He might not have a gun, but he still has some dynamite, machetes, and enough flammable gas to make another flamethrower later. Once Bill is dead, he should return to Bill’s camp and gather every discarded weapon he can find before heading back to the research group. Burt returns to his team and hatches a plan. They need to kill the queen and kill the shriekers on the island before they molt into fliers. The group splits and Burt and Jimmy head back to Shrieker island to kill the swarm. Their gps tracker leads them to a series of cool underground caves. Armed with Macgyvered new flamethrower and a chainsaw, they mud up in a puddle and put on ear protection as a growl echoes through the caverns. Suddenly, the shriekers attack. Burt machetes one easily. Jimmy swings his chainsaw at another, but the shrieker pins him. With the shrieker’s weird tongue literally against his cheek, he grabs for the chainsaw and cuts into its belly, freeing himself. They turn a corner and see five more stalking them in the darkness. Burt lights them up with his flamethrower frying them to crisps. When his flamethrower runs out of juice, he ends a barbecued straggler with a dagger to the heart. Jimmy is cornered by the last shrieker and lunges into the beast’s mouth with the chainsaw, chewing him up from the inside. This cave fight makes me want to see Burt take on the cave dwellers from The Descent in an epic underground battle royale. Let’s just hope Burt gets a bit more meticulous about the details. Covering ourselves in mud is a good idea to help camouflage us from the shrieker’s infrared vision BUT it’s only going to be effective if we actually coat ourselves in thick mud, rather than rubbing loose liquid mud on a few exposed areas of our skin. This wouldn’t ultimately cover up the heat given off by our breath, however. The flamethrower is a great weapon for this cave fight BUT it could be used more effectively with less risk to ourselves. If this were a completely sealed cave with only a single opening, their best bet here would be to approach the entrance to the cave with their flamethrower and shoot short flame bursts into the cave’s mouth sucking out all of the oxygen and either driving the shriekers out directly into the flame’s path trying to escape or suffocated them outright. That was one of the primary uses for flamethrowers during the world wars. Because this cave has an opening, that may not work, however. Instead, I would set a fire at the cave opening leading out onto the island before circling back to this water entry landing. With the exit cut off, you could then yell or shout to draw the shriekers to you and fire the flamethrower upon approach, also removing oxygen from the higher platforms of the cave while you still have an easy getaway in the boat. The other option would have been to bring a third person, carrying weapons they stole from Bill’s camp. With Burt up front wielding the flamethrower, the other two could have guarded his back. Teamwork makes the dream work, and right now that dream is napalming bugs. Back at the research camp, the team quietly waits for the queen to trip the dynamite parameter fence. She makes an explosive entrance, driving them all off the ground into platforms in the trees. Burt and Jimmy arrive. Freddie warns them they’ve stepped right on top of the queen. Burt tells the others to run for a nearby volcano caldera where they’ve laid their next trap while he stays behind as a distraction for her. When they’re gone, Burt walks calmly toward a nearby horse as the queen breaks ground nearby, triggering dynamite as she goes. Burt rides to the ridge over the caldera, leading the queen. There, the rest of the team has rigged a massive punji pit lined with dynamite. Jimmy is there waiting for Burt when arrives. He tells Jimmy they need the queen to charge them hard and fast so that she bursts through the cliff and falls to her death on the spears below. The big girl growls upon approach. Burt and Jimmy step forward. Burt pounds the ground with his boot, triggering her to charge. At the last second, Burt shoves Jimmy to safety and flips the queen the bird as she swallows him and plunges over the cliff onto the spikes. Freddie lights her up with dynamite and they all cerebrate in as her flesh rains down around them. While this finale gets the job done and kills the queen, Burt’s death was an unnecessary flourish to end the series. In the Nevada desert, they used a drop fall to kill the last graboid because they had no equipment or weapons to get the job done otherwise. Here, they have all the equipment they never took from Bill’s camp, as well as dynamite, to get the job done without sacrificing anyone’s life. Bill and Jimmy should have burst in opposite directions to reach high ground when Freddie alerted them to the queen’s presence under their feet. From above, it should have been relatively simple to arrange another dynamite swallowing trick. Even if the queen is ultimately big enough to knock down trees and water towers, she only does that reactively when the dynamite triggers her to strike the structure with enough force to tear it down. Safely off the ground, the group should have been able to trick her into eating a tasty nitroglycerin treat with a very long fuse, thereby saving everybody’s life. OR, if they really want to go for this off the cliff trick, why not tether one of the horses to the edge of the cliff instead. Its terrifying clomping would have easily drawn the beast in. OR maybe don’t walk toward the beast you’re trying to lure up the slope. Just stomp your feet from the edge, giving you plenty of time to dive out of the way without sacrificing yourself. Rich idiots are going to do rich idiot things, so preventing the graboids from ending up on the island altogether is taking things a step too far for these strategies. It is very likely, however, that if Jazz had simply left the hunters alone and gone to the mainland to warn the military. The only victim of the graboids would have been Ishi – RIP to a real one. To those of you who say they only had a few days to stop the ass blasters from taking over Asia, I would remind you Jimmy had to fly all the way to a remote Cast Away island in Papua New Guinea 3300 miles or (5300 km) away to get Burt in the first place. Literally the whole country of Thailand and three American military bases are closer to this island than Burt is. Bill and his bumbling band of poorly equipment billionaires were basically cannon fodder. Their training was weak, their aim was atrocious and I award all of them – including Bill – a survival score of 1/5. These guys are the stormtroopers of monster hunters. Anna had enough sense to jump ship when she could, but even then she came to fight godzilla with a bow and arrow and a 9mm handgun. She gets a survival score of 1/5 too. Once Burt arrives, using the dynamite effectively would have solved most if not all of the research team’s problems without any casualties on their side. But only if Burt properly debriefed them on the graboid’s abilities before visiting the island. Jazz had zero understanding of her own mortality, going to confront Bill instead of finding actual help. She survives basically because the queen graboid isn’t hungry enough to eat her and because the shriekers got to Ishi first. She gets a survival score of 1/5. Jimmy is at least smart enough to take Burt’s experience with the graboids seriously, so he gets a survival score of 2/5. Of the rest of the crew, Freddie’s the only standout, with her hard knock backstory and ability to rig explosive trip wires and actually hit her mark when she fires a gun. We’ll give her a survival score of 3/5. As for Burt, well…his symbolic sacrifice is admirable but ultimately unnecessary. He held his own until the end, but if he’d been more resourceful about scavenging Bill’s weapons and using tried and true methods like the pipe bomb swallowing strategy, he would still be alive. I award him a survival score of 3.5/5. This is the first time plot armor guaranteed a character’s death rather than preventing it – Burt got robbed, that’s all I’m saying. Ultimately, I think the SHRIEKERS from TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND were BEATEN. How would you have beaten TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND? Let me know in the comments. Hit the like button to save a stranger’s life. Hit the subscribe button to save your own. Thanks for watching, and remember, ignore the expert with 30 years of experience at your own risk.
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Channel: Nerd Explains
Views: 478,426
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: nerd explains, how to beat, cinema summary, deadmeat, critical drinker, tremors, tremors:shrieker island
Id: D9OKT9C-PJQ
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 32min 12sec (1932 seconds)
Published: Tue Aug 09 2022
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