Squirm Reviews

Man-eating worms are created from the regular variety when an electrical storm downs wires and fills the ground that harbors them with high voltage. A Georgia farm community falls victim to the slimy creatures, which have a way of responding to underlying tensions among the townspeople. The somewhat tongue-in-cheek tone for this movie is set from its beginning, when it is claimed in the opening titles that the story is based on an actual occurrence in Georgia in 1975. Jeff Lieberman, who would go on to direct the excellent BLUE SUNSHINE (1977), handles both the inherent humor of the situation and the actual scares with equal aplomb. The viewer is jerked back and forth between laughs and frights, as in the PSYCHO shower scene hommage, which features worms wriggling out of the shower head, or the genuinely terrifying scene in which the vicious worms are seen burrowing into a character's face (courtesy of Rick Baker's effects). The climax doesn't skimp on the worms either, for literally thousands of them invade a house and take it over. As with most of Lieberman's work, this is an underrated effort.