Haghh haghh, it’s Burl! Yuck, I’m here to
review a movie about worm eating, and yes, it could only be called The Worm Eaters! And yes, it’s about
people eating worms! Oh, they gobble those vermiforms up with the greatest of
gusto! Ha ha, and you can bet that it’s as gross as it sounds!
It seems there’s a small town in
California, and there lives a clubfooted German eccentric named Herman Umgar,
who runs a grimy restaurant, who keeps worms and has special names for them
all, and who has built a little castle for them all to live in! He sure does love his
worms! Though they patronize his restaurant, the townsfolk don't like Umgar very much,
and the evil mayor is trying to steal the deed to Umgar’s land, which includes
a lake near which three fisherman had something strange happen to them at the
beginning of the picture! We also learn that the mayor had at some earlier
point killed the wormkeeper’s father and buried him in concrete!
Well, in his slow-witted, weirdo,
vaudeville way, Umgar seeks revenge! He discovers that if he feeds his worms to
the townspeople at his horrible little restaurant, they will turn into
wormpeople themselves! Ha ha! After they gobble on worms for a while, the
victims begin to cough and choke like they’re hacking up a hairball; then they
emit paste; and finally their lower halves become slimy, segmented worm bodies,
and they crawl around on their bellies making yick-yack sounds! Umgar’s victims
include all manner of townies, perhaps most memorably two girls obsessed with
hot dogs! Well, they get their hot dogs, but not without a little extra protein
added in, ha ha! By the end, of course, Umgar himself is a worm, and he becomes
the victim of the three fishermen, who catch him with a hook tossed out from
the lake!
If you like gross close-ups of people’s
mouths as they suck up and chew on worms, this is the picture for you! It’s one
of those movies that seem to have been made by an experimental theater company
on their dark days, much like Futz or
Godmonster of Indian Flats! Really
though, it seems largely the creation of a guy named Herb Robins, well known from his appearance in The Funhouse, who wrote and
directed the picture, plays the part of Umgar, and happened to know a lot of
people who didn’t mind eating worms! The movie was produced by, of all people,
Ted V. Mikels, a bare-chested satyr of a man who lived in a small castle near
Las Vegas and kept multiple wives!
The movie has long, boring stretches with Umgar
soliloquizing and/or talking to his worms, scenes I suppose Robins thought were
amusing, but which really aren’t! The vermipeople in their rubber segmented
bodies are pretty entertaining though, and there are some performances (the head
fisherman, the mayor, a black woman who is far and away the most intelligent
and likable person in the picture) that are quite splendid! Other actors ham it
up terribly - you’d see more convincing performances at your local fringe
festival! The bottom line, though, is there’s an awful lot of worm eating to
suffer though here, and I confess I wasn’t equal to the task! I had to look
away several times, just as I had to press mute on the movie’s insufferable
theme song, which occurs over the opening titles, the closing titles, and once,
in a vastly overextended form, during the body of the picture! Like me, by the
time you get to that point in the film you’ll probably wish someone would sneak
up behind you and press a chloroform rag over your face! Ha ha, I give The Worm Eaters two hell of a lakes!
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