The devil doesn’t need to go down to Georgia in this broken trailer hitch of a low budget keeper, cuz, damn, the worms come out full force to take over a dirty southern small town and harass a couple of sickly-looking actresses. Thousands of bloodworms with large fangs appear. These worms scream their anger in many close-ups as if to announce: “We are the worms and we are pissed!” You see, the lil’ buggers got electrocuted out of the ground by a couple of loose power wires and they’re mad, engorged and ready to frenziedly burrow into some down-home southern white trash flesh and unsuspecting egg crème sodas.

SQUIRM is noted for it’s set designer’s eye for detail in portraying a poor Georgian town. Dirt must have been on the worms’ tour rider as the sets and cast members are dirty, as if the worms crawled over the kitchen, moldy shower, dishes and stars prior to filming. Fine actresses Patricia Pearcy (Geri) and Fran Higgins (Alma) look like casting found them dropping babies off in a Dumpster behind the Food King; both actresses are pale, dirty and covered in bruises (check out Higgins’ legs). Where they beaten prior to being discovered? Maybe the worms could only work with dirty people.

But how does that explain clean-cut nebbish Don Scardino (Mick)? Oh, Mick is from out of town. Stranded with his tennis racket in Dirtville, Mick is wickedly dragged into the mystery of Who Put The Worm In The Egg Crème? (a.k.a. the Please Get Over It People, It was Just A Chocolate Soda Sequence). Like a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew, Mick and Geri couple up and try to solve this mystery and the equally perplexing “Where is Mr. Beardsley?” puzzle over a pile of freshly worm-decimated bones on old Mr. Beardsley’s property. Beardsley lived alone. Where could he be? Yes, this is red state intelligence at work here. And that’s just the exposition before the big monster attack.

Throw in Crazy Roger, a halfwit and potential sexual offender, who repeatedly falls into impressive whirlpools of worms, to torment Mick and Geri and impede their sleuthing about wayward soda drinks. When the worms come, it is a mighty piece of cinema. Five foot walls of thousands of them, big suckers, oozing thru white trash homes, crawling over grandma as she does her knitting, making one giant oozing carpet that howls in anger, making for a nasty shower,
and threatening the town’s dick sheriff’s blonde pompadour. SQUIRM delivers lots of worms despite its low budget. Decent worm attack gore: the little devils actually burrow into Crazy Roger’s cheeks in one great scene. You can just smell the post-rain dead worm smell on the sidewalk here. And that’s just the actresses. Pour me an egg crème.