"I'm a victim of circumstance!"

What's that mean? Well, I thought that was an odd line to stick in the middle of giant monster horror flick. One of the principle characters spouts it out whilst driving. I don't know why they stuck in a Three Stooges reference. But who cares!? This movie is a weird one!

It's about two buffoons living in a backwoods town full of hicks. There's a college student studying seismic activity nearby, and the two guys, Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) and Valentine (AKA: Val, played by Kevin Bacon) find her. They have a chat and then go off to do something else. We find out that the guys do odd jobs as well as run a junk yard and some kind of septic-tank business. They plan on leaving the town and on each attempt, they find dead people. 

One of the dead guys is a regular drunk who seemly climbed up a power line pole and died of dehydration. Later on, they find the head of a guy underneath a hat (he got sucked into the ground by one the THINGS) and they also find some dead road workers. The road workers drilled into one of the beasts. 

What exactly are these things? They seem to be some kind of mutant crossbreed of a snake and a worm. They have no eyes or nose, but they hear very well. When they open their mouths, a bunch of little snake critters pop out. Those little ones are as thick as a body-builders arms and about six feet in length. They're used to catch the main beast's meals, which are about the length of a big truck...or maybe a semi; it's hard to tell.

Anyway, Earl, Val and Rhonda (the seismic student girl, played by Finn Carter) end up coming across one another. Earl and Val got chased by one of the animals and it rammed itself into a cement sluice of some sort. It hit itself so hard that it died. They all head back to town to talk about options because the girl noticed that the seismic activity occurs in multiple places at once, which implies that there's more then one. (Earlier in the show, one of the little buggers grabbed Earl's truck and got wrenched out of the big mama's mouth and dragged into town where it was bought by the local hardware store.) 

They climb onto some rocks to escape the animal and find themselves stuck. Luckily, there's some handy equipment lying around the boulders. They take some and jab the ground with it, and immediately the monster's tentacles pop out and bite it/them. So, Rhonda comes up with the bright idea of pole vaulting to the next set of boulders and so on to get to her truck. (Val and Earl set out on a pair of horses to get help, but their animals got grabbed by the creature...the reason they took horses was because the road to the next town was blocked by an avalanche of rocks.) It's never explained why those poles are there or why the beast doesn't grab the pole when it hits the ground. (PLOT HOLE!!!)

In typical monster movie fashion, the monsters get smart right quick. The one that lost one of it's "tentacles" is dubbed 'Stumpy' and it's really smart. They all come after the rest of the people in town. There's something like 3 more of the critters. 

Now's a good time to list the other players in this movie. Burt (Michael Gross (I)) and his wife, Heather (Reba McEntire), are gun maniacs. They have enough guns to arm a small army. Then there's the store owner (Victor Wong (III)), a couple of extras, a jerk kid named Melvin (Bobby Jacoby), Mindy (Ariana Richards) a little pogo stick girl with her mom (Charlotte Stewart), and the other people that get eaten. 

So, the critters come to town and wreak havoc. They come up the the stores floor and eat the manager. Weird thing in this scene is that before he's grabbed, the guy's bleeding. You figure it out. Everyone else gets on the roofs of there respective buildings. The monster worms start rocking the buildings to find food and they realize they need to get out of there. One of the critters zips off to attack Burt's house when it hears some grinding and Burt and his wife end up shooting clips upon clips into the thing...they manage to kill it though.

We'll leave the rest of the shows twists a secret. There's two more beasties to kill and you'll just have to suffer the show to find out how they get rid of them.

The Good Stuff:

The Bad Stuff:

If this movie didn't swear so much, it would have been light-years better. It had a fairly interesting plot, although they never did figure out where the creatures came from. Maybe they do in one of the two sequels...Some of the gore was nasty too, but it was kind of needed to help make the movie more of a horror flick. 

All I can say is, I don't ever want to see another movie with that much swearing. It almost gave me a headache. And I don't plan on watching this movie again anytime soon. If you were to run it on a v-chipped TV, there wouldn't be much dialog left in the show. Get this movie if you're really hard up.