Squirm *** (1976, Don Scardino, Patricia Pearcy, R A Dow, Jean Sullivan) – Classic Movie Review 13,608

An electrical storm unleashes carnivorous worms in the good and gruesome 1976 American horror film Squirm.

Writer-director Jeff Lieberman’s good and gruesome 1976 independently produced shocker film Squirm successfully mixes comedy with terror. John Scardino and Patricia Pearcy star as Mick and Geri Sanders, with R A Dow, Jean Sullivan, Peter MacLean, Fran Higgins, William Newman, Barbara Quinn and Carl Dagenhart.

The bite of an earthworm is fatal after a power cable snaps and a batch of the wiggly things turn killer in in the fictional town of Fly Creek in a rural Georgia area.

The worms, despite being fitted out with razor sharp chompers, are more disgusting than scary, but the sheer scale of little wrigglers used has guaranteed this film a cult status. The sometimes scary, sometimes amusing film is made with a lot of commitment and energy. The story is supposedly true, but you really would never know it from this account. Lieberman bases it on an event when he was a boy and his brother fed electricity into a patch of earth, causing earthworms to rise to the surface. So it’s a fantasy version of a real story.

It was released by American International Pictures, who edited it by one minute to remove the most graphic material and a shower scene with Patricia Pearcy, bizarrely seeking a PG rating, but it still ended up with an R rating in the US and an X rating in the UK. The MPAA re-rated the film PG in the US in 1977. The version for TV is extensively cut. Lieberman recalled: ‘In the theatrical version there was just enough of the worm attacks left for them to work, On TV, the cuts are ridiculous!’

The bulk of the finance came from Broadway producers Edgar Lansbury (younger brother of Angela Lansbury) and Joseph Beruh, with some advance money from American International Pictures. The film was successful, and Lansbury and Beruh made their investment back from overseas cinemas. It was released on VHS by Vestron Video in 1983. MGM Home Entertainment released it on DVD in 2003 with a full 93-minute running time.

Over the years, its virtues have become more evident (score by Robert Prince and photography by Joseph Mangine too) and it has become a minor cult classic, respected as a good example of the Seventies revenge of nature genre of film, better than Frogs and Night of the Lepus, but of course not nearly as good as Jaws.

Filming took place over five weeks in Port Wentworth, Georgia, one of which was just working with the worms. Half of them were made of rubber but the others included large sandworms from Maine, refrigerated and transported to Port Wentworth, and an estimated three million bloodworms provided by the University of Georgia Oceanographic Institute. Wires were run under the worms, which were electrified to make them move.

Make-up artist Rick Baker created the special effects make-up in New York for R A Dow’s character Roger Grimes, who turns into Wormface, making a facial mould using prosthetics for the first time in his career. The fake worms were drawn through Dow’s prosthetic skin using monofilament fishing line covered in lubricant, pulled from just out of shot.

The sound effects for the worms use balloons and shears, looping the two sounds using multitrack recording. The shears snapping open and closed are the sounds of their teeth. The sounds of the worms’ screams come from the 1976 film Carrie where pigs are slaughtered.

For his next film, Lieberman is also the man behind Blue Sunshine, the 1977 drugs and violence fest about a series of murders in  Los Angeles, using a strain of LSD. In 1981, Lieberman wrote and directed the slasher film Just Before Dawn, in 1988 he wrote and directed Remote Control, and in 2004 he wrote and directed the satirical comedy horror film Satan’s Little Helper.

Also in the cast are Carl Dagenhart as Willie Grimes, Angel Sande as Millie, Carol Jean Owens as Lizzie, Kim Leon Iocovozzi as Hank, Walter Dimmick as Danny, Leslie Thorsen as Bonnie, Julia Klopp as Mrs Klopp, and William A Lindblad as Power Line Repairman.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,608

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