- Earl Bassett, now a washed-up ex-celebrity, is hired by a Mexican oil company to eradicate a Graboid epidemic that's killing more people each day. However, the humans aren't the only one with a new battle plan.
- When an army of Graboids - giant, carnivorous underground worms - threaten the Petromaya oil refinery in Mexico, its owners call on Earl Bassett, who once helped kill four of the creatures in Perfection, Nevada. Having squandered the money that came from his resulting celebrity status, Earl is convinced by the $50,000-a-head bounty offered, as well as the enthusiasm of admirer Grady Hoover, who becomes his partner. At Petromaya, Earl and Grady meet geologist Kate Reilly, and begin Graboid hunting, tricking several Graboids into swallowing bomb-rigged, remote-controlled cars. When they find they're facing a lot more Graboids than they ever expected, Earl calls his friend Burt Gummer, a survivalist who arrives well-stocked with weapons.—Todd Baldridge
- Earl Bassett, now a laid-back living legend, is coaxed by the Mexican government into hunting and exterminating the Graboids that are threatening an important oil-refinery. But no amount of explosives could prepare him for what the worms have in store.—vaughnd711
- Six years ago, Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) and Val McKee left Perfection, Nevada, and became wealthy because of their discovery of the existence of graboids in Perfection. Now, Earl is living in Perfection again, and he's running a small ostrich farm, which is all that remains of his attempts to cash in on his encounter with the graboids. Earl lost most of his fortune through the ostrich farm, and other bad investments.
Earl is still haunted by the fact that some friends were killed by the graboids, and he and a number of other people were almost killed by the graboids. But he's about to face even more of them. The Petromaya oil refinery in Chiapas, Mexico is attacked one night by graboids.
A young cab-driver named Grady Hoover (Christopher Gartin), who is an admirer of Earl, brings an oil company executive named Carlos Ortega (Marcelo Tubert) to the farm. Ortega, who runs the Petromaya oil refinery, knows that Earl is one of the people who battled the graboids that attacked Perfection. Ortega informs Earl that a new graboid infestation has broken out in the refinery's fields in Chiapas, and several workers have been killed. Ortega wants to hire Earl as a graboid hunter. Earl refuses, horrified at the prospect that there are more of the kind of creatures that killed some of his friends.
Ortega mentions that he tried to secure the services of Val McKee, but got turned down. Earl says that Val doesn't want to get killed, because he's now married to a good woman, which implies that Val is married to Rhonda LeBeck. Grady tells Earl that Ortega is offering to pay $50,000 for every graboid that Earl kills.
Grady mentions being a fan of Earl and Val, and that he likes the Reebok commercial that they appeared in. Earl even has a graboid video arcade game in his trailer, and Earl and Val have appeared on the cover of People Magazine. Even National Geographic ran an article about graboids. Earl even has the centerfold of Playboy's Miss October of 1974 on his wall. Earl believes that he would still have a good chunk of his fortune left if he'd gotten a lawyer to help him out.
Grady tells Earl that the Mexican Army is willing to give him whatever he needs for the graboid hunt, even dynamite. Grady tells Earl that maybe it's his big second chance. Having squandered the money that came from the celebrity status that resulted from his encounter with graboids, Earl is convinced by the $50,000-per-graboid bounty, and he takes Grady as his assistant.
They travel to Chiapas, which borders Guatemala in the southernmost part of Mexico. At the refinery, while on the way out to the oil field, Earl and Grady are introduced to Pedro (José Ramón Rosario), the company's chief engineer, and Kate Riley (Helen Shaver), the company's geologist. She and Earl feel an attraction to each other.
Ortega brings Earl and Grady their meager supplies; a few cases of dynamite and two CAR-15s. Kate's assistant, Julio (Marco Hernandez), who has set up some seismographs, shows them a seismic vibration monitor that'll show where the Graboids are located. That night, Kate tells Earl that she, Julio, and Pedro are the only workers at the refinery -- they had to shut the place down because six workers got killed. The graboids were spotted 20 miles north of the refinery, and that's where the workers got killed.
Helen asks Earl who named the creatures graboids. He tells her that it was Walter Chang, and that Walter got killed by one of the graboids that attacked Perfection. Grady builds a chain with a few empty aluminum cans attached to it to attract the graboids when they drag the chain behind Earl's pick-up truck. Julio installs the seismic vibration monitor in the truck.
On the next day, Earl and Grady begin their hunt. Earl vows that he'll be wiser with whatever money he makes this time. After locating each approaching graboid with the seismic vibration monitor, the pair steer a remote-control toy car strapped with explosives towards the target graboid, which pulls down the car and gets blown up by remote detonation.
By the next morning, they've gotten 12 graboids, for a total of $600,000 -- $300,000 each for Earl and Grady. Grady thinks that they can use some of the money to start a theme park. But the hunt seems to go south when the chain gets snagged by a passing graboid, which takes the truck on a wild drag through the countryside. Grady grabs a gun and opens fire on it, not able to penetrate the ground deep enough.
The graboid finally stops, just short of the edge of a cliff, and then it turns and starts dragging the truck away from the cliff. The graboid pulls the truck toward a boulder. The chain snaps off of the truck as the graboid goes under the boulder. The seismic vibration monitor reports to the stunned Earl and Grady that about 8 more graboids are swarming in the area around them.
They beat a temporary retreat, and Earl calls a major reinforcement: Burt Gummer (Michael Gross), a paranoid survivalist in Perfection who also survived the first graboid invasion. Burt and his wife Heather appeared on the cover of Soldier of Fortune. Burt tells Earl that Heather is visiting her sister, and when Earl mentions the graboids at the refinery, Burt is ready to do battle.
Sometime later, at the refinery, Kate realizes that a fossil that she's been examining for over a month is the fossil of one of the spikes that a graboid uses to move underground. She tells everyone that the rock that the fossil was found in is from before dinosaurs existed, indicating that graboids originated in prehistoric times. Earl says that he always thought graboids were from outer space.
They see what they think is a graboid on the seismic vibration monitor that's in the building, and when Earl looks out the window, he sees Burt arriving in a deuce-and-a-half that the Mexican Army is letting him use. The truck is loaded with supplies, weapons, about 2.5 tons of high explosives, and mounds of military field rations. Kate, who does not yet fully understand how extremely difficult it is to kill a graboid, thinks that what Burt has brought with him might be a bit too much.
Kate goes to the building, and Burt tells Earl and Grady that the explosives make his home-made bombs look like cherry bombs. Burt hands Earl an elephant gun, warning him that the kick from that gun can break his collar bone if he doesn't handle it the right way. While Grady is putting stuff in Earl's truck, Burt admits to Earl that Heather left him, and she called Burt, and told him to send her their HK91. Burt shows Earl and Grady a Grizzly single-shot .50 caliber BMG based on a World War I anti-tank cartridge.
Earl, Grady, and Burt resume the hunt, with Earl and Grady quickly getting into a semi-friendly competition with Burt. Earl and Grady see another graboid on the seismograph. Oddly, the graboid is moving away from them, wandering aimlessly instead of hunting. Earl and Grady investigate. Upon reaching the top of a hill, the graboid surfaces. In a panic, Earl backs his truck down the side of the hill, and into a pile of boulders, damaging its rear axle.
Earl and Grady see that the graboid has not moved. The graboid makes loud, painful noises, and when Grady and Earl check on it that night, it looks like its body has been hollowed out, with gaping holes in its body, leading Earl to believe that something emerged from it. While Earl tries to contact Kate over the radio, he notices that the radio's transmitter has been damaged, but they manage to get a message out to Pedro to pick them up.
And then Earl and Grady hear another graboid making a noise just like that of the one that they encountered earlier. Grady sees Pedro's truck coming up the road, only to stop. When Earl and Grady walk to the truck, they see that it's engine is damaged beyond repair, and all that's left of Pedro are his severed arms. Earl decides to call for help by hiking to a nearby radio tower.
Burt has become worried that his monitor is showing no graboids, and he starts heading back to the refinery. When Grady and Earl reach the radio tower, they find that it's been damaged. Earl spots a car near a small bar that Grady tries hot-wiring. The two hear a strange noise, and then they see a creature resembling a smaller two-legged graboid emerge from the bar. They come to be known as shriekers.
Grady and Earl kill it, but three more shriekers come for them. They drive the car back to the refinery. As Burt is trying to get back to the refinery, he's ambushed by shriekers. The shriekers are what emerged from the graboids. Kate, unable to contact anyone, gets worried. Julio agrees to find them. As he's about to leave, a shrieker attacks and kills him.
Grady and Earl arrive and kill the shrieker. As they're about to leave, another shrieker appears and begins damaging their car's engine, but Earl kills it with the elephant gun. They realize that 3 shriekers came out of each of the 8 graboids that they couldn't kill, and they've killed three shriekers, which means there are now 21 shriekers left.
Burt arrives, with his truck damaged from the shriekers that attacked him. Burt is angry that he didn't know about the shriekers. Grady tells Earl that the graboids just suddenly changed. Earl tells Burt that they would've warned him if the shriekers hadn't damaged the radio tower. Burt barely survived -- he dropped the first wave of shriekers with semi-auto fire, but they kept coming. Most of them were in front of the truck, so he put it in six-wheel drive, and ran over them. He handled the ones that got on board with a combination of small-arms fire, and hand-to-hand techniques, at the unprecedented cost of using up all the bullets in his Beretta 92FS Inox guns.
Kate believes that it would've been important to science to study one of the creatures, and get more information on it. Burt tells her that that fact wasn't lost on him -- when it was all over, one of the shriekers was just stunned, so he detained it. Burt parks the truck in the refinery's garage, and Kate closes that building up. They're all unaware that another shrieker has stowed away underneath the truck.
Experiments with the now-caged shrieker reveal its heat-seeking ability via a heat sensor on the top of its head. They gather in packs and hunt by heat, for example a person's body temperature. When one detects a heat signature, it shrieks. They were attracted to the heat of the radio tower, and the engine in Pedro's truck.
Kate, Earl, Burt, and Grady also learn that when shriekers eat enough, the shriekers reproduce asexually, spitting a grotesque birth sac from its mouth that quickly matures. The stowaway shrieker drops off the underside of Burt's truck, and finds his rations, which leads to an explosive regrowth of the shrieker population in the refinery, which puts Kate, Earl, Grady, and Burt under siege.
Earl, Burt, Kate, and Grady temporarily get trapped in a small building that's under construction, but they manage to escape by carrying doors to hide their heat signatures behind. The group plans to drive off with Julio's truck, but a shrieker is blocking their path. Burt uses his .50 caliber rifle to kill it, but the bullet goes through the shrieker, and damages the engine block of Julio's truck.
More shriekers trap Grady, Earl, and Kate on top of an oil tower, and Burt in the bucket of a payloader. Earl and Kate get a chance to talk, and Kate admits that she appeared as a Playmate in Playboy once, in order to help pay her way through college. Earl realizes that Kate is Miss October of 1974, whose centerfold is on the wall of his trailer in Perfection.
The shriekers start stacking onto each other's backs in order to reach Grady, Earl, and Kate. Burt makes the shriekers chase him into the storage building where he parked the army truck. He's able to escape and lock the building, trapping the shriekers inside. However, that proves to be problematic, as the storage building is filled with Burt's rations, which allows the shriekers to reproduce at a rapid rate.
Knowing that they can kill the rest of them with some of Burt's explosives, Earl devises a plan to cover himself with frost from the fire extinguisher, which is cold enough to allow him to enter the building undetected, and gather some of Burt's explosives from the truck. As Earl is going in, the frost covering him evaporates, and the shriekers see Earl in Burt's truck. Earl quickly activates a timed charge, and throws it into the back of the truck.
Grady, Burt, and Kate use a hose to pull Earl out through a window. Burt says that they had better get as far away from the building as possible, because there are 5,000 pounds of high explosives in the truck. The four run to a relatively safe distance. The timed charge detonates the explosives in the truck. The refinery is leveled by a massive blast, which kills all of the shriekers, and leaves a crater where the refinery's buildings once were.
As Earl, Grady, Burt, and Kate survey the crater, Grady cheerfully points out just how much bounty money they now have coming to them, since they killed 28 graboids, making $1,400,000.
As they walk toward the remains of the refinery, Earl suggests that they also charge Petromaya for the shriekers that they killed. When Grady says that they can open up their own theme park, Earl says, "No way." Grady says, "Oh, C'mon, Earl. This could be like your big third chance." It's implied that Earl and Kate have become an item.
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