The Worm Eaters (1977)
* (out of 4)
Ted V. Mikels produced this film that was directed, written and stars Herb Robins. In the film Robins plays a German man who has a special friendship with some worms. He eventually has a breakdown and starts feeding these worms to some of the locals who themselves turn into mutant worm creatures. THE WORM EATERS is an extremely bad movie but if you could come up with a catchy title and get it into the drive-in market then you could have a good hit on your hands and I can imagine a lot of people going to see this movie just on dares. The film runs 90-minutes, which is about thirty-minutes too long because there's really not much going on here. For the first forty-five minutes or so we see Robins talking to himself, talking to worms and just coming across as a complete weirdo. Once people finally start eating the worms these "shock" sequences really aren't all that shocking today considering many mainstream shows (Man vs Wild, Fear Factor) have gotten you used to seeing people eat worms. The scenes here are obviously done by a couple stunt worm eaters because we just see close up shots on their mouths with the worms in them but apparently no worms were injured, which seems true since we never see them bitten into. The mutant worm creatures appear to just be the actors with some sort of sleeping bags around their bottom half with various types of white foam coming out of them. Obviously this film wasn't trying to be the next CITIZEN KANE but it just needed a lot more entertainment in order for it to work. Those curious about the strange title and low-budget nature of the story might be tempted to watch it but there are certainly much better movies out there.
