Squirm (1976) Review

Squirm (1976) Review

 

Some types of animals were just destined to be featured in horror movies, like sharks, crocodiles, or tarantulas. It can be a laborious effort to make certain kinds of animals scary, though, but it’s been attempted over and over (usually to less than stellar results). Writer-director Jeff Lieberman was inspired by a traumatizing childhood incident to make a horror movie about killer worms. I can accept that worms are at least a good creepy crawly to feature in a horror movie—how many times have we seen a rotting corpse writhing with them?—but a whole movie about killer worms? Aside from Tremors, Squirm is the only notable example of this that I’ve seen, and it is nothing like Tremors.

A freak storm makes a mess of Fly Creek, a small hick town in Georgia. Severed power lines flop around on the ground, electrocuting masses of worms, and it cuts back to the sparking wires several times throughout the movie to remind us that this is how evil killer worms are apparently created. A young woman named Geri, who lives with her sister and mother, asks her creepy neighbour Roger if she can borrow his truck to pick up her boyfriend Mick, who is visiting from New York. It’s established early on that Roger has a thing for Geri, but she isn’t interested. Mick comes off as a douchey city boy and is quite unlikeable upon his introduction to the story. I wanted to see him killed by the worms, but then it becomes clear he’s one of the main characters, and we’re stuck with him. He becomes more tolerable later on once he has to step up to face the threat of the worms, but for the first half it’s mostly focused on slow character-building scenes, then the worms move in for the kill and it gets more interesting. 

Squirm is one of those movies that aims to be serious and scary, but becomes unintentionally funny at many points. There was something earnest in its setup and execution that kept me interested despite it not being that interesting for the majority of the first half of the movie. The Fly Creek residents have terrible southern accents, are all varying levels of odd, and are completely clueless about the impending worm invasion until it’s too late. The turning point comes when Mick and Geri go out fishing with Roger, and Mick insists on returning to shore and leaving Geri alone with Roger to fish—nice move, Mick! Roger starts acting inappropriately toward Geri, but before he can take it too far the worms they’re using as bait attack him! This isn’t the end for Roger, though. He comes back later on, completely deranged, while Mick, Geri, and the rest of her family try to survive the onslaught of worms as they invade the house, making for a tense and entertaining final act.

So, how do you make worms scary? Well, there are some interesting attempts, such as close-ups of bloodworms with their toothy mouths overlaid with a screaming sound effect. That particular trick with added screams is a classic of schlock filmmaking, and is definitely funnier and weirder than it is scary. There are some creative moments with the worms, though, and when there are hundreds of thousands of them writhing about, it’s pretty gross to look at (made grosser by some of the other more effective sound effects). How about this inversion on the shower scene from Psycho? You know that cliché tribute shot of the camera pointing up at the shower head? Let’s have worms crawl out of the fixture! It’s one of the most memorable shots in the movie, actually, and Roger’s face swarming with worms and bleeding is one of the most gruesome visuals on display. The effect was created by Rick Baker, and this movie came out the same year as the first remake of King Kong, in which he portrayed Kong by wearing a full-body gorilla costume, but in the years to come Baker would become better known as a monster makeup and prosthetics creator rather than a creature performer, and this is a pretty good early example of his effects work.

Squirm is forty minutes of suspenseful killer worm horror and forty minutes of bullshit. If you can find some enjoyment in the first half like I did, it’s worth getting through to reach the second half. If you’ve enjoyed B-movies and/or eco-horror films from this era in the past then check it out, but otherwise it isn’t exceptional enough to recommend beyond that.