B-Sides: You’ll End Up Eating Worms
Steve Barton
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Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. Guess I’ll go eat worms. Or you could just go watch the bizarro 1977 horror comedy The Worm Eaters. Rarely will you hear a song as cheery as this about a subject as disgusting as worm eating.
Produced by Astro-Zombies helmer Ted V. Mikels, The Worm Eaters falls into a very special class of bad cinema. Actually, it’s pretty much in a category of badness all its own. A total gross-out comedy, yet a PG-rated one that appeared to be aimed at juvenile audiences. About people eating worms and then becoming worms themselves.
When a club-footed German hermit (Herb Robins, also the writer-director) with the power to psychically communicate with worms gets run off of his worm farm by the town’s mayor, he does what any crazed worm whisperer would do. No, not send the worm to kill his enemies Ben style. He plants a special breed of his worms in everyone’s food and watches as they transform into mutant worms that look like actors writhing around in flesh-colored sleeping bags.
Kicking off the film is David L. Newman’s “You’ll End Up Eating Worms”, the happiest, cheeriest PBS children’s programming song you’ll ever hear about eating worms, set to an opening credits sequence that would leave you to believe The Worm Eaters was a book being spotlighted on “Reading Rainbow”.
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Categorized:B-Sides
