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Post by dem bones on Sept 25, 2009 8:25:36 GMT
Richard Curtis - Squirm (Sphere, 1976, 1978) Alan Hood IT’S RAVENING, GUT- CHILLING, WORM-POWER - IN THE ALL-TIME HORROR CLASSIC!Blurb: “This was the night of crawling terror! SQUIRM is the blood-curdling shocker calculated to make you writhe with terror. A sleepy Southern town doesn’t know what’s hit it when a freak nightmare of a storm brings down the overhead electrical power lines which then direct a massive electrical charge into the wet mud. And that’s just the beginning. For the slimy, oozing, crawling horror which results - an angry rampaging mass of carnivorous superworms - is the most terrifying threat ever to be unleashed on (or under) the surface of the planet…”"Gimme a buck! Gimme a buck 'r I'll put the cursa squirmy death on ya! .... Cursa squirmy death, cursa squirmy death! Whammy whammy presto fuck ya!" - Troll in Richard Laymon's FunlandLong County, Georgia, one sweltering night in July 1960. Roger Grimes, seven, is unable to sleep so naturally, his mind turns to his biggest phobia: worms. They petrify him. He even disgraced himself at Ma's funeral by diving into the grave and carrying on after the Pastor read a tactless passage from the Book of Job. To make matters worse, his father, Willie, is Fly Creek's premier worm farmer by day, wannabe mad scientist by night, forever looking at ways of speeding up sandworm production. This night when Roger slips out to the shed, there's Dad perched over his aquarium with a battery charger and two wires firing bolts of lightening into the tank. The juicy sandworms are reacting weirdly to the jolts, most notably, they appear to have completely forgotten their aversion to the light. Here, you try it for yourself, Roger! Fifteen years on, and Fly Creek is suffering its worst storm in living memory. Roger, minus a portion of his thumb as a souvenir of father's Frankenstein period, has just accidentally caught next door neighbour Geri Saunders prancing around naked as she readies herself for the arrival of her boyfriend, aspiring lawyer Mick Gordon, who's busing down from New York. Roger and Geri have always been close friends, but it's strictly a surrogate brother and sister relationship, much as he wishes it wasn't. To be honest, the local gals regard him as handsome enough but a bit of a dork. With the electricity is on the blink - a snapped cable is shooting it directly into the soil! - and flooding on the edge of town, Geri, fretting that Mick won't make it, charms Rog into lending her his truck. He explains that it's loaded with a full shipment of worms, but ....OK. Geri's kid sis Alma, fifteen, takes a break from listening to her Led Zep album to maliciously let on that Geri's going to pick up her boyfriend .... This is all very readable but Richard Curtis will have to pull his socks up if he wants us to take this seriously as a proper 'When Animals Attack': there's only a hundred pages to go and no fatalities, little prospect of any bad sex on the horizon. Now we're off to Mr. Beardsley's f**k**g Antique Shop 'cause Mick's a keen collector. Is this novel never going to get a move on? Oh, wait a sec. This is more like it ..... To be continued ..
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Post by Johnlprobert on Sept 25, 2009 9:07:10 GMT
While we're at it (ooer!) can I recommend the movie? It's loads of wormy fun, and the commentary track on the DVD by director Jeff Lieberman is worth the price of admission.
In fact I have a yearning to watch it again....now!
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Post by dem bones on Sept 26, 2009 17:20:53 GMT
Mick's arrival in Fly Creek sends Roger into emotional meltdown, bad news for him, a godsend for us as, at last, we have a proper horror novel on our hands. Left alone with Geri in a fishing boat, he blurts out his feelings and, when she doesn't react with enthusiasm to his marriage proposal, it looks like we might get some blouse ripping at the very least until a half-dozen stowaway worms intervene and provide perhaps the novel's best moment. With a mutilated madman loose in the woods and skeletons turning up every place he looks, Mick makes one last attempt at convincing Sheriff Reston of the lethal flesh-eating worm menace, but the good ol' boy despises the kid on account of him being a city kid and, rather than investigate, he takes his latest conquest back to the jail-house for a late night seeing to. Nice one, think the more voyeuristic of the worms, who are now seeping out of the ground in their zillions ...
Squirm is fair tidy when we EVENTUALLY get around to the night of the worms. My minor quibble - and that's only 'cause it doesn't pamper to my particular vices - is that Curtis isn't to be rushed. At least two-thirds of the novel is build up leaving just fifty pages for the carnivorous worms to do their worst, and the body-count is so high that many an agonising death has to squeezed into a sentence or two. Also bad sex might as well not have been invented. But if it's at all faithful to the film, i'd happily watch it, mostly to see how incidents during the fishing expedition and the apocalyptic scenes set in Quigley's Bar are handled. There's also some nasty business with a shower head which can't help but make you think of John Halkin's superb Slither!
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