The sudden wave of earthquakes that swept across North Texas in the past couple of days also sparked a wave of concern about the practice of fracking in the natural gas industry. The earthquakes gave us quite a scare as well, but not because of fracking. We've been assured by the oil and gas industry and Texas' fine environmental regulators that fracking is completely safe. Besides, we've seen too many movies to not know the truth.
This is how it always starts. Something obvious gets the blame and then ... wham! ... some ungodly creature that's sees us as nothing but McNuggets with legs pops out of the ground and starts picking us off one by one.
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"That's how they get ya," Kevin Bacon once warned. "They're under the goddamn ground."
So it's a pretty ingenious move on the part of the Alamo Drafthouse to set aside time for a screening of the 1990 cautionary tale Tremors starring Bacon and Fred Ward. It's more than just the story of a tiny Arizona town that includes Reba MacEntire and the dad from Family Ties fighting off a hoard of alien burrowers with an unquenchable appetite. It's a warning to tasty humans that Mother Nature may appear predictable, but she can still unleash a hell beast on the planet if she so chooses.
Of course, we're not saying that the recent round of earthquakes were caused by giant man-eating earthworms. It could be some other plausible, natural cause. Giant ants, maybe. But it damn sure wasn't fracking. Nuh-uh. No way.
Tremors screens at at 7:30 p.m. Monday.