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It’s not that I dislike worms. I have been fishing on more than one occasion. I don’t do it well, but I have done it. I’ve also raised boys. Boys and worms go together. That’s a given. Thankfully, I’ve never had to deal with any worms of hideous monster size like the ones in Jeff Leiberman’s Squirm, one of the great drive-in flicks of the 1970’s. Kids, this movie creeped me out big-time, and I am one jaded old-schooler.
One heller of a storm has hit the coastal town of Fly Creek, GA. The power is out, the phone lines are down and the summer heat is unbearable. Live wires flail against the super-saturated ground, sending thousands of volts into the soil. The air is full of barely concealed rage and sexual tension. It’s a bad time for a New York City boy to visit his new Southern girlfriend at the old homestead, but that’s precisely what Mick (Don Scardino from He Knows You’re Alone) has chosen to do.
Geri (Patricia Pearcy) is Mick’s red-haired vixen, and he’s not the only one with his eye on her. Roger (R.A. Dow) is a strapping lad who isn’t quite all there, but he knows what he likes, and that would be redheads. When the bus Mick is riding into town on is forced to turn around, Mick decides to get off and trek through the woods to Geri’s place. In the meantime, Geri has used her feminine wiles to get Roger to let her borrow his truck to pick Mick up.
On the back of the truck are 100,000 worms. The family business is worm farming. And these just aren’t any worms. These are bloodworms. They bite. Are you getting the picture here?
Geri inexplicably finds Mick in the middle of the woods and drives him into town. While Geri is retrieving a block of ice so the food in the refrigerator at home won’t spoil, Mick visits the diner. He orders an egg cream, which completely confuses the Georgia-born counter girl. When she finally whips up something sort of like his order, Mick tentatively takes a sip. He spits it out and knocks his glass over because his drink had a little something extra in it. No, not a rufie. A huge writhing bloodworm. The waitress believes he slipped it into his drink on purpose so he wouldn’t have to pay for it, which gets Mick in dutch with Sheriff Reston (Peter McLean), a toothy good ol’ boy who looks like he could be Jerry Reed’s stunt double. Mick’s a damned city slicker in the wrong part of the country, and the Sheriff warns Mick to watch his step.
Geri lives with her mother, Naomi (Jean Sullivan), a woman who has been a little bit nutty ever since her husband died and her fugly stoner sister, Alma (Fran Higgins). When Mick enters the picture, it’s sort of like those old Warner Bros. cartoons, where the large-breasted blonde woman with bad teeth looks at any nearby gent and screams, “A MAAAAYYYYYYYUUUUUUNNNNNN!” Suddenly, Mick is the center of attention.
As Mick and Geri head off in the family roadster to a local’s house to check out his antiques, Roger stops them in the road. It seems that all the worms that were in the back of the truck when Geri borrowed it are gone. Roger’s father, an old angry man, blames Roger and slaps him around in front of Mick and Geri. By now, Roger resents everyone and everything and you just know he’s going to snap.
Things take a turn for the worse when Mick and Geri go fishing with Roger, the creepy slow guy. Roger has brought the worms, of course, because he can get them wholesale. However, he refuses to bait the hook. He tells the story of when he was a child and his father had just started the worm farm. Trying to come up with new ways to harvest his slimy crop, his dad came up with the idea of using electricity. He soaked the ground, then hooked up Roger’s electric train transformer and shoved the leads into the soil. The worms came up, but they were crazed. One of them bit half of Roger’s thumb off.
Mick decides to go back to shore to some more investigating, leaving Geri alone with Roger in the boat. Roger decides to make his move with Geri. Not being too socially skilled, this involves attempted rape. The ruckus rocks the boat, baby, and spills the carton of electricity-addled worms. As Geri fights Roger off, he slips, landing smack dab in the middle of the worms, which immediately begin eating their way into Roger’s face, tunneling into his cheeks and chin. Those of you waiting for Roger to snap, that time is now. He leaps overboard and scuttles off into the woods.
As night falls in Fly Creek, the worms surface to feed on the isolated town, and it’s up to Mick to save Geri and her family from the juiced-up carnivorous worms by any means possible.
I really don’t want to get all French auteur here and read more into Squirm than what is actually there, but the movie does have more depth than your basic nature-gone-crazy movie. The sexual repression issue is palpable, especially in the character of Naomi. When Mick needs to change out of his wet clothes, Naomi begins gently wringing her hands and says to Geri, “Well, I suppose he could wear some of your father’s old clothes… .” It’s a great bit of business because Naomi is just barely under control, staring down this piece of man-meat her daughter has brought home. It gives the movie a sweetly disturbing undertone that resonates even in the non-horror scenes.
The gore is minimal in Squirm but the gross-out factor is still amazingly high because we’re dealing with worms with teeth. Lieberman likes to show up macro-close-ups of them, while the soundtrack peals out this horrible high-pitched electronic scream. It’s disgusting. When the worms attack en masse, it’s like watching a lava flow, except it’s worms. Or like seeing a river. Of worms. Worms coming out of shower heads, air vents, through the door of a jail cell, walls of worms six feet high… it’s a hell of a thing.
The movie’s major problem is the writing. A lot of the dialogue doesn’t ring true, and I know it doesn’t, because not only do I live in the South, but The Artist Formerly Known As My Wife’s family lives in Georgia. However, Lieberman did capture the desperate attempt to keep decorum during crises that we Southerners are known for. “I hear those worms can strip the flesh of a human in less than three minutes! Would you like some more sweet tea?”
There are a couple of plot holes, some things that just seemed to happen a bit too neatly, like Geri finding Mick in the middle of the woods. Who is she, Brer Rabbit? The character of the Sheriff is too stereotypically “Southern,” with his, “Now, listen heah, boy…” dialogue. Beyond that, the acting is uniformly… uh… ’70’s; a little stilted and stage-like, trying to show some emotions, but mostly sounding like they’re reading lines off cue cards. Cue cards covered with worms.
Squirm looks dated. How could it not? It was made in 1976. But remember, this is before CGI began threading its insidious way through horror effects. All the worm shots are straight up physical make-up effects, courtesy of some guy named Rick Baker. A remake of this movie with computer generated worms would be a travesty. Squirm’s literal earthiness keeps it believable.
Lieberman’s pacing is what keeps the movie going. In less skilled hands, a movie about killer worms would have been laughable. But his skill in keeping the story moving along keeps the tension on and when the shocks come, they are palpable. I watched it by myself and found myself saying aloud, “Oh, God! That’s fuckin’ nasty!” And it is nasty, because worms are gross.
No one is going to be discussing Squirm in film school, nor will most fans place it in their top ten. But Squirm is a fascinating, multi-layered horror film, chock full of Southern Gothic elements and tens of thousands of hideous nasty flesh-eating worms. It’s a curiosity, but one that deserves to be more than underrated.
