Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy) is keen to get washed and dressed this morning because her boyfriend Mick (Don Scardino) is headed to her remote rural home in Georgia, quite a journey as he is travelling from New York City. As she dries herself in the bathroom, she catches sight of handyman Roger (R.A. Dow) noticing her through the window, and worries about what he may be thinking. But not time to concern herself to that as Mick is on his way, though since the violent storm last night some of the roads may be closed - and the lightning has had another effect.
That being it knocked over a power line pylon which is currently sending thousands of volts into the ground. Why should that be important to our characters? The clue's in the title: countless worms have been energised and in their frenzy, have turned into a real menace, so yes, as you might have guessed, this was the killer worms movie, part of a cycle of revenge of nature flicks that proliferated throughout the seventies and appeared to take in just about every animal filmmakers could conceive of turning nasty, so by 1976 the slithery little critters' time had come for stardom.
As brief as that was, and Squirm was underappreciated for a long while, though since its release it began to enjoy cult favour as its mixture of disgusting effects utilising truckloads of the creepy-crawlies and a spoofy tone exhibited in a strain of cheery black humour proved something worth spending time with for horror fans wanting some of that low budget innovation from this decade. Director and writer Jeff Lieberman's main influence was obviously Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, as had been the inspiration for most of this trend, so instead of Tippi Hedren travelling from the city to a small town you had the hapless Mick.
Scardino, who went onto direct a host of series television including a whole bunch of 30 Rock episodes, made for an amusing comic hero who found fresh reserves of capability when push came to shove, and he made a truly endearing double act with Pearcy's Geri. While there was little here absolutely hilarious, the steady stream of observational humour based around the difference between the city boy and the country folk, neither one completely favoured above the other, offered a quirky sensibility which assisted the film through its long build up. You needed this to cover up for the fact that nothing much happens for the first half.
Sure, there were the odd menacing developments, such as the discovery of a skeleton, and the troubled encounters between Mick and the unfriendly local Sheriff (Peter MacLean) - when he finds a worm in his "egg cream" the Sheriff thinks Mick put it there himself as a prank - but for a while you would be wondering if the money ran out and they were forced to be sparing with the worms. Rest assured, although the sense of a community under siege was beyond Lieberman's means, he did have access to apparently billions of his bad guys, so once the overbearing Roger gets a faceful in the film's most famous scene, the floodgates are opened and the images of people covered in worms are memorably revolting, mainly because that was precisely what you were looking at. Alright, they were not of the flesh eating variety, but seeing cast members swamped in them was a great visual for a horror movie and Lieberman milked it for all it was worth. Not to mention nearly wiping out his principal cast with a falling tree. Spaghetti, anyone? Music by Robert Prince.
