Squrim
Written & Directed by Jeff Lieberman
Mick...Don Scardino
Geri...Patricia Pearcy
Roger...R.A. Dow
Sheriff Reston...Peter MacLean
City boy Mick (looking like a younger version of Dexter) is visiting the lovely young Geri Sanders in the backwoods town of Fly Creek, Georgia. Obstensibly he's there to do some antiquing, but you get the feeling that he's less in the market for a Victorian era rocking chair than he is for some pretty little bumpkin booty. But that's besides the point.
As Mick arrives, the town is just recovering from one doozy of a storm that knocked out the electricy from swamp to shining swamp. Unknown to everyone but the viewers, a downed powerline has landed on the Grimes family worm farm, pumping thousands of volts of electricity into the slimy bastard bloodworms beneath the surface. This mutates them into deadly predators who are quick to attack and even quicker to digest, leaving behind nothing but a skeleton picked clean.
Mick and Geri are, obviously, our heroes here, and the only ones who know what's going on. Sheriff Reston is the prototypical smalltown lawman, a Southern-fried "Alpha Male" who won't trust anything that an outsider like Mick might say. He's more of an obstacle than a villain, though. That role is reserved for Roger Grimes, son of the worm farmer, who is obsessed with Jeri and is enough of a threate even without the killer worm angle.
I'm not normally much for these Nature-Run-Amok horror flicks, aside from Hitchcock's The Birds--but that's Hitchcock, for Christ's sake! But Squirm, along with its younger sister Slugs, both hold a special place in my heart due to their cheesy, slimy, slithering goodness. I mean, one worm? That's no big deal. Ten, twenty worms? Gross, maybe, but nothing to write home about. But, say, one-hundred-thousand worms, all squirming around in a massive tidal wave rolling through the house? Now that's what I call a party! Look for the unrated or R-rated version for a minute more of gooey grossness than the PG version.
Good, gross, graphic fun full of great lines like, "I'm not a tourist. I'm a Libra," and the immortal "Hey! There's a worm in my egg cream!"
1976
Unrated/R
93 Minutes
Color
English
United States
"This was the night of the CRAWLING TERROR!"
--J/Metro
