Squirm!

Or... The moment that makes you queasy.

      Mystery Science Theater 3000 is an amazing and uniquely entertaining show. Squirm (Jeff Lieberman, 1976) is a terrible movie. A match made in heaven. I have watched every single episode of MST3K ever produced. Well, actually, I've watched all of the episodes after Joel left. He was a good host but those episodes just seemed boring. Mike Nelson will always be THE host for me, but I digress. I was watching the guys lambast Squirm in their usual style when something unusual happened. The movie actually made me uncomfortable. In the safest, most secure viewing environment possible, a single shot in the movie made me, well, squirm in my seat.

      It comes near the end of the film: The secondary antagonist, Roger Grimes (the worms are obviously the main antagonists), has gone insane with worm fever and is chasing down the protagonists. In the process, he falls into a literal sea of worms and is instantly pulled under the surface. The effect was shoddily done, cut to just a second or two, and utterly silly looking. I knew all of that and yet, for some reason, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I couldn't stop imagining thousands and thousands of worms wriggling their way into your flesh and devouring you in tiny pieces. It's horrifying in every sense of the word. On a certain level the visceral is almost secondary to the more cerebral part of the effect: that will happen to you. You will die, and you will be devoured by worms and insects afterwards. There is absolutely nothing you can do to avoid that. The fact that a B movie that was over thirty years old when I watched it made me actually consider my own mortality is... impressive. Not so much on the part of the film, but on the part of the genre in general. Even when a horror movie is terrible it can make you think.