I liked the detached tongue creatures in this one.
You've seen Guy Standeven in something because the man was in everything.

That's how I thought of it too. I already mentioned it in a couple other posts but my opinion is that they are actually a new part of the life- cycle and that the shriekers did not evolve in this one. As for the new designs they actually remind me of worm "mouths" under a microscope so again I liked the thought they put into it.

I never thought of it that way. They may have very well been larval graboids. But notice when the guy (can't remember his name) is eaten out of the helicopter the graboid's toungues, or tentacles, whatever you choose to call them, were identical to the "grabbers".

I really like the new fiercer designs of the monsters.
And everyone in this thread got it wrong. Just because Burt Gummer called them tongues did not make them tongues.
Burt Gummer never met Dirt Devils, Hiram Gummer did and Hiram Gummer made a pact with the other survivors to never tell anyone about any of the monsters.
So Burt Gummer was just an unreliable narrator in that instance. They were Dirt Devils.
They didn't look like the tongues of the creature, they looked like the larval form of the Graboid that jumped out of the ground and swallowed the guy.
And now that someone mentions it,
the guy who has one attached to his head, that was a little reminiscent of Deep Rising.

The weird thing about the Assblaster is that it resembled the descriptions of the Mi-Go aliens from H.P. Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in the Darkness".

Heat sensors near the head of the tentacle. I don't remember if it is in the movie or the deleted scenes, but there is a shot where they can be seen (it is never talked about. This movie lacked learning graboids and discussions on what to do next). I think the tentacles served as graboids filler due to the low budget as they were probably cheaper to render (remember stampede declined to be involved as this was the lowest budget film in the series)

The new graboids were fine. I actually kind of liked how they jumped out of the ground like Shamu. That would have seemed ridiculously out of place if the graboids back in Perfection started doing it all of the sudden, but here we were given a logical explanation for why these ones are different, and it made for a pretty cool new effect.
The new assblaster was pretty cool looking, but the teeth bugged me. Graboids shouldn't actually have teeth. Only the made-up monsters on the DVD covers have teeth.
What I ended up finding kind of offputting were the detachable grabbers. The idea never really payed off or added anything to the movie, and the logic behind them seems pretty poorly thought out. How do they actually capture prey? Doesn't seem like an individual, unanchored tentacle could drag someone back to the main graboid. How do they see? Based on the scene at the end with the two circling the little girl, they don't seem to hunt by vibrations, and they don't seem to have heat sensors. What's up with that?
Furthermore,
I suspect this site may not fully grasp the concept of signatures.

I was fine with the graboids design, but not the Assblaster or tongue. The tongues were just copied from the tentacles in DEEP RISING. In tremors 2 and 3 you got a sense of the species from both the shriekers and assblasters. While different, they still had recognizable graboids features. The Tremors 5 assblasters looked completely unrelated to the graboids, there were no shared features. Another thing that bugged me big time was the fossilized graboids being found so close to the surface. The big thing in the past was there not being fossils (1 spine in tremors 2 is it, and it was found extremely deep). If fossils of graboids were so close to the surface they would have been discovered way before they were.

I have to say, going in to this movie, the creature design was my chief concern.
I've grown up on this series, and seen the films several times. The creature design of the graboids, shriekers, and AB's is unique, but also awesome and memorable.
Seeing some of the promo's and trailers, I think it was very very clear that the we would have new designs, so I knew from the get-go I would be just a little disappointed.
And it held true, honestly, I was pretty disappointed with the designs overall. The ass blasters look so odd, and so far from any graboid design, it was kind of sad.
The graboid design did not bother me nearly as much. While I liked the execution concept that the tongues could leave the original graboid to fetch prey, it still seemed off to me.
Finally, the CGI was surprisingly good, and I felt they did a good job with it in general.
I think for a 6th tremors film, they need to return back to the America's for the worms we all know and love.