The Graboids evolve to walk on two legs, waving a set of heat-seeking skull flaps to find prey in the follow-up to 1990’s surprisingly entertaining initial dose of desert monster mayhem. Both Kevin Bacon and Reba McEntire opted to skip this belated sequel, which led to drastic budget cuts and a shift from Universal’s feature film division to its direct-to-video team. Man, does it show. So does the actors’ reasoning: this script is terrible, an empty husk with none of the self-deprecating bite of its predecessor. In one fell swoop, the franchise has shifted from a campy, playful sorta-parody with a nose for tension and a gross sense of humor to just another shallow, inept horror / action mixer.

In the absence of its charismatic celebrity lead, the sequel’s narrative is split between returning costars Fred Ward and Michael Gross. While together, these two immediately display an old camaraderie that’s warm and refreshing, a welcome callback to the chummy redneck neighborhood vibes of the original. They’re almost instantly separated. Ward goes in one direction, paired with an annoying dudebro type and a ditzy, middle-aged _Playboy_ model turned geologist, while Gross goes it alone and talks into a handheld camera. I guess the idea was to produce his own low-rent documentary series, but that subplot is only hinted and quickly abandoned. The gang does get back together in time for the explosive finale, which is really the only time _Tremors 2_ generates any charm. Despite some awfully shabby CG creature effects, that climactic race around a set of abandoned outposts and over a series of rickety ladders at least provides a reasonable approximation of what worked the first time around.

There’s just no denying how cheap everything feels, from the redundant location selections and bad effects work to the cruddy direction and flat, one-take performances. And again, it’s not like the script would’ve improved if the studio had elected to throw money into it after all. Most of the time, _Aftershocks_ isn’t even amusingly bad. I can’t believe they made five more of these.