How to Eat Fried Worms is a Surprising Delight
By Orson Scott Card
When the movie How to Eat Fried Worms debuted this weekend, it didn’t gross enough even to make the top ten. And that’s a shame.
As flicks for school-age kids go, this one is terrific. It packs emotional punch without being sappy. It’s also genuinely funny. Most of the acting is actually good – a shocker in a movie that gives 95 percent of the screen time to child actors.
I think what might be keeping people out of the theaters is the concept of eating fried worms.
And don’t make any mistake: There is an enormous amount of worm-eating in this movie. Plus lots of worms that aren’t eaten, but you think about what it would be like to eat them.
Here’s the funny thing: My 12-year-old and I agree that the single most nauseating thing in the movie is a kid in the back seat of a car with a burrito smeared all over his face.
The premise is that Billy (Luke Benward) is a new kid in a school where his grade is ruled by a bully named Joe (Adam Hicks). Billy’s only friend is Erika (Hallie Kate Eisenberg, the best actor in the movie), who hit puberty before the boys and therefore towers over them.
Without any provocation from Billy, Joe and his “team” fill Billy’s thermos with worms. Billy makes the mistake of throwing one of the worms at Joe, hitting him in the face, and then claiming that he eats worms all the time.
The result is an inescapable challenge: to eat ten worms by seven p.m. Saturday, cooked in whatever way Joe chooses, without throwing any of them up. This seems an impossible challenge, since Billy is prone to motion sickness and pukes all the time.
Hey, it may sound gross, but give this movie credit: It’s not your standard “mean teens” movie.
The gross stuff is there to delight kids and make them say “Eeeeeewww.” There’s plenty of humor to amuse adults. But in the midst of all this there is a smart and satisfying story about how you go about breaking up a bully-dominated gang and ending a social war.
Benward, Hicks, and Eisenberg are young, but they have the acting chops an the personal charisma to drive this movie. Writer-director Bob Dolman (wrote Willow and Far and Away, and wrote and directed The Banger Sisters) did a wonderful job of adapting Thomas Rockwell’s YA novel. (There was a TV movie of the book twenty years ago, too, but I never saw it.)
I would have enjoyed this movie without a kid with me. But I’m glad she was at my side – because, unlike me, she has a weak stomach and is highly suggestible. If this movie was going to make anybody chuck the bunny, it would have been her. And it didn’t. So it probably won’t nauseate you either.
Give it a shot. I think it’s worth it.
This review was originally published inThe Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.
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