Earlier, there's his heroic charge to rescue Rhonda when she's caught on some barbed wire and being dragged towards the graboid's mouth. He starts by slamming a pickaxe through the graboid's head, then when that doesn't work he saves her through quick thinking and Cutting the Knot (or rather, the pants).
Burt Gummer is one big walking CMoA, though his most defining moment is probably from the first film, when he and his wife Heather are attacked in their bunker by a Graboid. Listening on the radio the others hear Burt yell, "Jesus Christ!" and think it's all over...then a beat later, they hear gunshots echoing across the valley. Cut back to Burt and Heather going to town on the Graboid with their guns. They run out of ammo, and it looks like it's all over for real...then the camera pans over to thegiganticWall of Weapons. Burt and Heather spend a solid two minutes or so blasting the damn thing with increasingly larger guns, with Burt finally taking it down with an elephant gun. Heather probably would be just as highly regarded if only Reba McEntyre hadn't cut ties with the franchise at that point.
"Broke into THE WRONG GODDAMN REC ROOM, didn't you, you bastard!?"
After Val, Earl, and Rhonda make it off the boulders to Rhonda's truck, Val punches a grabbed tongue that comes at him while Rhonda leans through the back window of her cab, starts the car with one hand and shoves down on the gas with the other hand to get them out of there as fast as possible.
When Val rams a pickaxe into a Graboid's back to keep it from eating Rhonda, the monster uses one of its tongues to pull the pickaxe out.
Miguel comes up with an idea to use a tractor as a decoy to divert the Graboids, neatly eliminating the need for anyone to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
Earl comes up with the idea of going "fishing" for Graboids by tying a bomb to a rope and dragging it across the ground to attract them.
The It Only Works Once adaptability that lets the last two Graboids foil the attempt to escape in the bulldozer and re-deploy one of Burt's bombs are villainous CMOAs.
While the basement scene is Burt Gummer's most defining moment, there's a scene in Tremors 2 that's just as beloved. After barely surviving encounters with individual Shriekers, Earl, Grady, and Kate hear an ominous rumbling. They look outside to see Burt's truck approaching, torn to hell and half-covered in Shrieker guts. Burt stumbles out, shaken, exhausted, and splattered with blood, but without a single visible injury. He then proceeds to deliver what might be the single most awesome line in the entire series:
"I feel I was denied critical...need-to-know...information."
Burt then follows this up with an explanation of how he survived such an assault:
"Well, when the radios went down I decided to return to the refinery, but en route, I find I'M IN AN AMBUSH SITUATION! Must have been a couple dozen of these things! Well, I dropped the first wave with semi-auto fire, but they just kept on coming. Sheer luck most of them were in front of the truck, so I just popped it into six-wheel and ran 'em down. The ones that got on board I handled with a combination of small-arms fire and hand-to-hand techniques. [pulls out two pistols]I am completely. Out. Of ammo.[Beat]That's never happenedto me before."
Doubles as a CMOF. The combination of Michael Gross's delivery and the hilarious lines make it one of the funniest scenes in the franchise. It must be seen to be appreciated. Here.
Oh, it gets better. He captured one of them alive. By beating it into submission with his bare hands, and then tying it up and throwing it in the back of his truck.
Even better? From his explanation, he actually KILLED some of them with his bare hands!
Also, he's the ONLY person in the ENTIRE FRANCHISE to actually be eaten by a Graboid and SURVIVE.
Even better. He's the only person in the entire franchise that could be eaten by a Graboid, survive, and the audience will absolutely believe the plausibility of said survival. It's believable simply because this is Burt Freaking Gummer. Chuck Norris has nothing on this guy.
As of Tremors 5: Bloodlines there is another survivor of being swallowed by a Graboid. He was swallowed whole, head first, and holding a gun. He convinced the Graboid to spit him out by "tickling its insides a little".
Tecopa from Tremors 4 may have been a one-film character with a scant handful of lines, yet he managed to deduce one of the Graboids' key weaknesses (collisions) and bait one into a fatal headache. And apparently does so on the fly, in less than a minute!
One of the most subtle scenes of Burt Badassery is when Melvin comes running out pretending to be attacked by the dead graboid tongue. Burt nearly shoots him, thinking like the others he is being attacked. When Melvin reveals it is all a prank, Burt goes rushing over and pins him to the ground. What he says next is a CMOA for anyone who has seen a similar lack of gun safety written off in other films and shows that Burt, while a Crazy Survivalist, takes safety seriously.
Burt's other subtle moment of awesome gun-safety also involves Melvin. In order to get Melvin to run at a crucial time, Burt hands him a revolver to comply with Melvin's constant requests for a gun. As he's running, Melvin pulls the trigger, only to find that the gun is empty (entirely intentionally, as Burt did not trust him for obvious reasons.) In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, when Burt retrieves the revolver, he flips the cylinder open and confirms that it is empty despite explicitly knowing that it is, simply because that is exactly what you're supposed to do when securing a firearm.
The montage in the second film where Earl and Grady kill a dozen Graboids (using bombs in remote control trucks) over 2-4 days. It's Played for Laughs, but it's still an impressive accomplishment.
He doesn't have much of an opportunity to live up to it, but Miguel gets a good Badass Boast in the third movie
Miguel: The BLM man gave me permission to kill anything that represented a danger to my cattle. El lobo, el coyote, and el Graboid.
Miguel MacGyvering a fishing rod to safely retrieve a walkie-talkie is a good moment from the third movie.
Tremors: The T.V. series
Twitchell gets one in an episode dealing with a large mutant brine shrimp when he realizes that when they implement their plan to kill the creature, it could just turn tail and swim upstream. He proceeds to jump into his car and drive it off a cliff into the aqueduct, blocking the creature's potential escape route. Up until this point, Twitch had been more of an Obstructive Bureaucrat and The Load.
Nancy gets two when they're trapped in Burt's safe room due to a scientist trying to breed "safe Shriekers" for search and rescue ops. First, she demonstrates that she knows a thing or two about how to make a bomb because she had "radical friends" in the Sixties. Then, when the Shriekers sneak up Burt's escape tunnel, cutting off their escape route, she rips the bomb off of the door that they were planning on using it for, and tossing it down the tunnel with the Shriekers.
Tyler, Larry, and a scientist who had come to study El Blanco manage to stop a a swarm of deadly, carnivorous insects by making a giant fly strip with tar, then barbequing them all with copious amounts of gasoline.
Rosalita gets one for kicking a Shrieker in the face.
In one episode, Burt, with only a few minutes to act, successfully instructs a small group on the proper operation of muzzle loading rifles to take out a group of Shriekers.
