FANTASIA OBSCURA: A Slimy Creature Feature That Worms Its Way Into Your Heart
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, it’s magic when the sparks fly between two people, or at least into the ground…
Squirm (1976)
Distributed by: American International
Directed by: Jeff Lieberman
To be blunt, the whole red-blue political divide didn’t start in 2016. And no, it was not something that had just been lying dormant between 1865 and then, either.
In fact, there were reflections of this in film during the 1970s. You had Deliverance in 1972, Macon County Line in 1974, and Moonrunners in 1975 (the last one having been the inspiration for the TV series The Dukes of Hazzard). All of them had good ol’ boys that din’ much care for them city folk coming on through, and each one built to differing levels on an antagonism between both sides where dem good ol’ boys oft got the better of ‘em folks on their land. Wasn’t lot of common ground ‘tween them in most of them pictures.
Save one, where both camps bonded over not being worm food…
The film opens with a silent crawl that suggests that there might have been a real-life incident that was the basis for the film:
Late in the evening of September 29, 1975, a sudden electrical storm struck a rural sea coast area of Georgia. Power lines, felled by the high winds, sent hundreds of thousands of volts surging into the muddy ground, cutting off all electricity to the small, secluded community 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.
This is the story…
Not exactly The Legend of Boggy Creek-level of fake news pretending, but that was never the plan here…
After we get scenes of the action described in the crawl above, we watch as Geraldine Sanders (Patricia Pearcy) takes a shower to get herself cleaned up. She’s expecting a visit from Mick (Don Scardino), a gentleman caller from New York who’s in the area to do some picking for his antique business back in the city. Downstairs, her mother Naomi (Jean Sullivan in her last role) and sister Alma (Fran Higgins in her only role) are contending with the loss of power, while outside Roger Grimes (R. A. Dow in his only role), the neighbor who’s sweet on Geri, is doing yard clean-up for the Sanders to better get into their lives.
Mick has a bit of an adventure trying to walk through the woods to see Geri, with the roads washed out, but still manages to meet up with her.
While they are in town, Mick goes to the local luncheonette and orders an egg cream…
…yeah, explaining what one of those are is going to take a while, so pertinent info only: Most New Yorkers know better than to try and ask for one anywhere outside of the five boroughs, so everything that happens to him next, he had it coming…
…which included the first sighting of the menacing worms (which is played here by a millipede, but hey…) and getting an instant dislike from the sheriff, Jim Reston (Peter MacLean). Which is a great way to start your stay in Georgia if you’re a Yankee…
There’s not enough time for anyone to process any form of southern hospitality, however, as those worms driven to the surface by electricity (which, yes, can work) start eating the citizens of Fly Creek. They get particularly ferocious when taken to be used as bait by Geri and Roger, who himself gets a bit ravenous around Geri:
When they’re not starting to feel closer to each other (which crises can do for a couple), Geri and Mick ultimately figure out what’s happening, and how to keep the worms at bay with light and fire, just as the sun goes down. Unfortunately, they never get a chance to share this info with other townspeople, who learn just how bad the problem is when it’s too late:
In terms of the townsfolk, much of the cast were locals from Port Wentworth, GA, where the film was shot. Lieberman filmed his first feature film there, some 40 years before The Walking Dead would set up production in the state and before Marvel would film many of their superhero films around Atlanta. As noted above, two of his principals, Higgins and Dow, were among the locals who had but one taste of film work, and this was it.
For a first theatrical feature, shot on location by the Brooklyn born and bred writer/director, Lieberman shows considerable skill with what was estimated to be budget under $500,000 (about $2.5M in today’s dollars). He managed to get the best of the practical effects, which included actually crashing a tree into a set and hundreds of live worms for many shots, as well as being blessed with having the legendary Rick Baker as his makeup designer, but was well blessed with an amateur cast that seemed to give him little to worry about.
What also helped was having Pearcy and Scardino as his leads. There’s a decent chemistry between the two of them that gives the film something solid to hold it in place, even when the script calls for a few contrivances and big asks of the audience as we head past sundown. And each one comes to the other as an equal; they even share the same amount of time minute-for-minute in an unnecessary state of gratuitous undress in separate scenes.
You feel either of them could probably handle this crisis alone, but together they complement each other and enhance each other’s skill sets. It’s a level of equanimity that’s hard to find in most screen parings, genre or otherwise. The fact that it’s so rare and worthy of note 
says volumes about how badly we represent in film; that fact that this is a cheap genre shoot that does it better than a multi-million dollar tent pole screams it.
And in this case, the fact that you can have two characters, one “red” and one “blue” that are looking to work together, gives us hope for the future. It may not be tomorrow, and there may not be so many of them as we could use now, coming in dribs and drabs, but it’s a start.
And if we can get a few such pairings without an electromagnetic worm wave to bring it about, there may well be a better future to come…
NEXT TIME: The Reich might possibly have called this Operation Frostriese, but then they would have been getting ahead of themselves…
