Mystery Science Theatre Version is better ;)

uniquefreak- I agree, it's one of my favorites as well, but you can't deny that Legend of Boggy Creek 2 is one of the greatest.

yorrickhunt2- Get a grip! If you don't get to listen to the "sarcastic", yet hilarious, comments, what's to keep the interest of the crappy movies? Have you ever even seen one of these MSTified movies? They're hilarious. I don't see your problem with it.

Yeah, the same here. I never cared for Mystery Science Theater, mainly because the couple episodes I watched for a few minutes weren't very funny, and if I haven't seen a film already, I don't want someone talking over dialogue. A lot of the films that were on MST I actually like, such as this one--a 7 out of 10 from me.

Alot of movies they cover on MST3k you wouldn't wanna watch on your own anyway. I know I wouldn't of bothered with this movie unless it was mystified.

Share the suffering.

There's nothing wrong with MST3K per se. The thing with MST3K is, it's just too damn easy. B-Grade schlocky 50s scifi films & the like are TOO EASY as targets. It's important to have a sense of humor yes. But which sense do you have? The sense to watch an enjoyably bad movie with your buddies & make fun of it yourself or to listen to others do it? Something to think about for those of you who claim to have such an advanced SOH. Also, the type of audience that MST3K appeals to are the mostly unknowledgable film fans that are unable to look @ a film objectively & take into consideration when it was made & how influential it was. To poke fun of a Harryhausen scifi or "This Island Earth" is just in bad taste to a knowledgable scifi/horror film fan.
That being said, Jeff Leiberman is an extremely competent director & Squirm is justifiably a classic of the genre

Peace

<<< If your good and drunk, you can make a good one. We did one with Harry Potter.



My favourite quotes from the Squirm MST3K

This is the Story... "of a man named Jed"

and

"Um, I accidently married the sheep"

they're STILL making mst3k dvds?!

lol

Which version is better? It all depends how you want to watch it. I like both versions.

I was disappointed that the MST version cut out one of the most horrifying things in the movie- what happened to Roger in the boat. Otherwise, not much that really mattered was cut, but being a fan of the show, I would've liked to see the uncut movie riffed. I understand the time constraints and all, but maybe some show episodes could have been 2 1/2 hours long and if the network wanted to cut it down to 2 hours, so be it- if we could have the whole episodes on DVD. All in all though, this was a good episode with funny jokes. IMO, this is one of the best movies they did.

By itself, I find it to be a good horror movie. The only thing I have against it is there is no answer to the question, "How and when did Mr. Beardsly die"? If the worms got him, there should have been an indication of passage of time. You don't have a totally de-fleshed skeleton just a few days after death. Other than that, it had good storytelling and pacing and a good atmosphere, things that horror movies today could learn from it.

I'm probably the kind of movie fan every horror/sci-fi director from the early silents to the 1980's hoped is out there in spades. I grew up on Marvel comics and love the older ones to this day. I also like the movies that are still coming out to this day. They take much suspension of disbelief and you don't have that ability, you can't enjoy a horror/sci-fi movie in the way it's supposed to be enjoyed. Perhaps also of note is the fact that I'm a near-life-long pro wrestling fan. Sometimes that a takes a big suspension of disbelief too.

Squirm is a movie that doesn't take as much suspension of belief as Night of the Lepus. While rabbits can bite, no one is grossed out or creeped out by them. But there are people who are grossed and/or creeped out by worms. Do worms bite? That depends on the species. Some have hooks around their mouths like tapeworms and leeches for attaching themselves to their host. These things seemed to have spider-like mouth parts, so they certainly could bite. These worms were somehow altered by the electricity from the downed power line. I'd like to believe, for my suspension of disbelief, that there was some other mysterious element that played a role. So what if it was never mentioned in the movie. They never tried to figure out why the worms were acting that way anyway.

Going back to Marvel comics, a combination of a secret "super soldier formula" combined with mysterious forces in the swamp to change scientist Ted Sallis into the Man-Thing. No one in the comics ever tried to investigate those forces but they were obviously there. I think D.C.'s The Swamp Thing had a highly similar origin. Then you had Hydro Man, who was Navy seaman Maury Bench. He fell overboard into some mysterious forces in the water and became the dreaded supervillain. Who's to say there are no mysterious forces in the real world? In the real world, you have times when dead birds fall from the sky. Supposedly, there were also mass bird attacks like in Alfred Hitchock's The Birds. Ships and planes mysteriously disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. There has been spontaneous human combustion. Who's to say whether an animal species (perhaps like those real life birds) can't be altered into killers or just aggressive attackers? Maybe the alterations could include size as well.

Suspension of disbelief comes more naturally for some than others. For the others, I believe it can be learned. Once you learn it, you can even use it for movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space! For movies from before your time, you would also need to keep the time era in which it came out in mind and it helps to know the lingo of the time and their ways of doing things back then. S of D is actually topic there is a whole lot to, so that's all I'll say about that.

Squirm is good in either version. I recommend watching the original version of all MST3K movies first, so you can choose whether or not to enjoy it on its own merit before MST3K makes you automatically dismiss it as a bad movie that you wouldn't watch without the MST3K guys. Many people were unfortunate victims of that trap.