12 Surprisingly Awesome Straight-To-Video Movies
7. Tremors II: Aftershocks (1996)
Why It Should've Sucked: Some six years after the original 1990 monster flick bombed at the box office (but tore it up on home video), a Kevin Bacon-less sequel was finally released STV with around one-third of the original's budget. Yikes.
Why It's Awesome: On paper, there's no way this should've succeeded, but Tremors II is proof of what results a passionate crew can come up with when their budget is stretched to absolute breaking point.
Somehow, the graboids are still fairly convincing (or as convincing as they need to be, anyway), and while the film is absolutely inferior to the original, it still retains the same sense of fun and rough-hewn charm.
Particular credit to Fred Ward and Michael Gross for their performances here, the latter of whose Burt Gummer would become the protagonist of the three Tremors sequels that followed (yes, three, the latest co-starring Jamie Kennedy).