Here's our first review for the new look Cine-apocalypse. Shawn Francis takes a look ARROW VIDEO's U.K blu-ray of Jeff Lieberman's 1976 horror fest, SQUIRM. This movie creeps me out, I first saw it when I around 13, it was a late night and I can't remember a lot about it, but i remember it creeped me out. Anyway's check out Shawn's review after the jump.
Late in the evening of
September 29, 1975, a sudden
electrical storm struck a rural sea
coast area of Georgia. Power lines,
felled by high winds, sent hundreds
of thousands of volts surging into
the muddy ground, cutting off all
electricity to the small, secluded
town of Fly Creek. During the period
that followed the storm, the citizens
of Fly Creek experienced what
scientists believe to be one of
the most bizarre freaks of nature
ever recorded.
ever recorded.
This is their story . . .
Written By Shawn Francis
IMDB indicates
Squirm was released on July 30, 1976. That would make it the
summer of my seventh year of life. I never saw it in a movie theater,
but I most certainly have vivid memories of seeing it advertise on
TV.Back then commercials of horror movies would scare me and this one did without a doubt. The one scene seared into my brain (this exact TV Spot is included on the US DVD) was a quick shot of Roger’s face as he peers into the kitchen window at Geri after she lights a candle. The commercial cuts rather quick so you don’t fully see his face, but that near subliminal shot hung long enough in the mental ether for me to understand this poor guy’s face was really fucked up, like, scary fucked up.
I also don’t
recall if I really understood what the movie was about, even when the
title, Squirm, comes on, which also added to the fright this
whole viewing experience gave me. Squirm? That’s a verb. You
can squirm around, but what does it mean in the context of this
movie? I think that may have even been the first time I had even
heard of the word, now that I think about.
They’re right.
It’s what you don’t understand that’s really the
scariest thing of all.
If I had to guess,
I’d say I was probably eight years old when I saw the movie on TV.
Funny thing is I can’t rightly remember anything about it, just
that damn commercial.
After that opening
crawl I posted at the beginning of the review we’re introduced to
Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy) and her mother, Naomi (Jean Sullivan).
Naomi’s is still feeling skittish after that thunderstorm they had
the night before. So much so that throughout the movie Geri and her
sister, Alma (Fran Higgins), walk on egg shells so as not to upset
her further with anything they might say and do, which becomes
hard at points in the movie when bodies start piling up and certain
“things” from under the ground start taking out their rage upon
the poor, defenseless humans of Fly Creek.
But before all that
happens Geri heads off to meet what might be a potential boyfriend, a
city boy by the name of Mick (Don Scardino) whom she met at some
antique show. He’s come to visit for a few days and to go antiquing
in Fly Creek.
We also meet local
boy, Roger Grimes (R.A. Dow), a next-door neighbor and worm farmer
who clearly has a crush on Geri. Whether she knows it or not is never
clear, but she asks Roger to borrow his truck so she can go pick up
Mick and it just seems to me in that scene that she knows and uses
those feelings to get him to give her his truck.
Our first victim is
Mr. Beardsly, his skeletonized body is found by Mick and Geri, but
when they bring in the local Sheriff, Jim Reston (Peter Mac Lean),
the remains have mysteriously gone. Reston had a run-in with Mick
earlier and didn’t take kindly to him making it fairly obvious the
cops are not going to be much help in this movie.
Things don’t get
really “interesting” until Mick, Geri and Roger go fishing. The
worms they use, as explained earlier, are bloodworms Roger recounts a
moment from childhood when his father experimented with electricity
to see if he could get them out of the ground. It worked but the
electricity made them ornery and they chewed off part of Roger’s
thumb.
After Mick makes a
quick getaway to see if dental records of the skull he found in the
back of Roger’s worm truck are Mr. Beardsly, Geri and Roger are
left alone in that boat to fish. This is when Roger turns from being
a somewhat likeable hick to a jealous violent one when Geri rebukes
his advances. He then slips and falls and gets his face drilled into
by the bloodworms they took along as bait. It’s a god-awful sight
as we see them burrow into his cheeks and forehead. He flees into the
nearby woods screaming to high heaven.
As the bodies began
to pile up and darkness approaches (the bloodworms aren’t to keen
about bright light, be it natural or man-made), Mick, Geri, Alma and
unaware Naomi hole up in their house, but the worms infiltrate it by
coming in through the show head Alma forgets to turn off. It’s not
long before the tub is full to the brim and not long after that that
they pour out into the rest of the house, literally covering the
floor in a knee-deep mass of squirming madness.
Roger returns having
gone mad with his facial infestation and still under the illusion he
can make Geri his. He even manages to survive falling into the wormy
mass in the living room, appearing even more infested and acting even
more wormlike by squirming up the stairs on his belly.
This entire movie
plays out during the course of one day and one night—SPOILIER
COMING—with a happy ending for Mick, Geri and sister, Alma.
Squirm comes
to region B DVD and especially blu-ray in the UK courtesy of Arrow
Video. The remastered 1080p 1.85:1 anamorphic high definition
transfer of the blu-ray is quite detailed and gorgeous looking. The
uncompressed 2.0 Mono PCM audio was quite good as well. There are
subtitles only for the English and no other languages but that one to
switch to.
The audio commentary
with director, Jeff Lieberman, done for the US MGM version has been
ported over as well as the theatrical trailer. New additions
exclusive to Arrow’s DVD and blu-ray is a ‘Filmed Live Q&A
session with Lieberman and star Don Scardino from New York’s
Anthology Film Archives’ (2012, 24:03), which was filmed on
8/17, after a 35mm showing of the movie where he and actor, Don
Scardino, who now resembles Jerry Springer (an American talk show
host who revels in tabloid fodder on his show), takes questions from
the audience. It’s a nice companion piece to the commentary
Lieberman did for the film, and ‘The Esoteric Auteur: Kim Newman
And Squirm’ (16:09) where author and film critic, Kim Newman,
comments on Lieberman’s career, nature run amok films and Squirm’s
place and influence in genre cinema history.
Until we here in the
US get a blu-ray of this flick I recommend fans seek out Arrow’s
version to tide you over.
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