Having read many of the reviews on Amazon, I expected great things from Tremors 5 : Bloodlines. Sadly, it’s best to be described as “another instalment in the Tremors franchise”. It’s always good to watch Michael Gross as Burt Gummer, although he shouldn’t be expected to carry the whole film on his shoulders. He’s the only reason worth watching, even though enough isn’t done with his character. They should have played much more heavily on the “Gummer without his arsenal of weapons” side of the story, perhaps making Gummer have to improvise to take out the creatures.

The modern special effects are great, but it’s often difficult to tell if these are supposed to be the same creatures we’ve previously seen in Nevada or not. They look so different (due to modern FX), yet they’re called the same names without anyone actually noticing how different they look.

The first three Tremors movies gave us the full lifecycle of the Graboids, even if it did feel a little like “what are they going to morph into next time?” towards the end. The fourth movie gave us a new spin on the Gummer character. The TV series opened up a whole new world of ideas thanks to the mysterious underground lab in Perfection – creating some great new characters along the way, and giving Gummer a couple of fantastic episodes. This 5th film seems like they wanted to abandon all of that and just rehash old ideas with new FX and only one recognisable character. As such it doesn’t deliver what it should.

It’s clear (particularly from the TV series), that there is a lot more that future Tremors films could explore so I hope that this 5th movie isn’t the last we see of Gummer and the Graboid-legacy. They could do a lot worse than have the next movie based around the TV series, bringing the other creatures into Perfection and have Gummer really go to town on them.

Still worth about 3.5 stars (so I’m giving it 4) just for Gummer and to see our friendly neighbourhood Graboids back in action, but not the best that it could have been.