Squirm

So this movie was originally made in 1976 and then it quickly faded into obscurity until it was released on DVD by Unearthed Films many years later. The problem with finding films that have to be unearthed is that there's usually a pretty good reason they were "earthed" in the first place, and in the case of this movie, it's pretty terrible. The opening credits did show a lot of promise, though, with a creepy little kid's voice singing a song about hearing the dark creeping up the stairs coming after him, so I was hopeful that maybe the movie would be better than its reviews might lead me to believe.

No such luck. The acting in this movie is horrendous. Every single actor looks and sounds like they're practicing their lines in front of a mirror, which grates on my nerves. Not only that, nothing happens for a full hour or more onscreen, leading me to believe the filmmakers forgot this movie was supposed to be about killer worms (you there, stop laughing, this is serious, the WORMS are going to KILL us...why are you still laughing?) That's right, something about the electricity of a downed power line leeching into the ground has pissed off the worms in this small town, and they've decided to kill and eat all the humans in sight.

Now, if you're like me (and I know I am!) you think worms are icky, and on that score, this movie actually does deliver some shuddery scares as the icky worms crawl out of faucets and bite and burrow their way under people's skin. Eeeeewww. The problem is, the scenes of action are too few and far between the boring scenes of everyone sitting around being a bad actor. this movie could have been cut by a full hour and you wouldn't have missed anything important. The characters all act like they live in some alternate reality. They say weird, nonsensical things (like when the daughter asks her mother if she remembered to lock the front door so the worms can't get in, even though a fucking tree fell a few hours earlier and took half their house with it, so the worms could just crawl through the gaping hole where the wall used to be).

The characters also do things that really don't make much sense, and they're all a bunch of slack-jawed yokel idiots. I''d say the filmmakers were trying to mock people from small towns, but the guy who hails from New York city isn't any smarter (at one point, he tells his girlfriend he will run a mile and a half to an old torn down house to get some plywood to cover the gaping hole in the side of her house, and she asks him how he'll carry it, and he replies "I'll figure something out!" and he runs off instead of taking the fucking CAR with him). The climax with the worms is pretty icky, but I had to slog through a long, boring, nonsensical movie to get there, and I don't feel it was much worth the trip.