Customer Reviews

How to Eat Fried Worms

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It's hard to call a film cute when the story revolves around a kid eating worms in a variety of ways, but certainly there's a lot to this film once you look beyond the whole yuck factor. It actually succeeds in turning worm-eating into a metaphor that resonates with meaning for adults as well as children, for we all have to eat a worm or two every so often (again, metaphorically) as part of life. It's all about how we project ourselves, and how honest we are to ourselves and those around us  especially those we really want to impress. What I'm trying to say is How to Eat Fried Worms is actually a wholesome film with a number of important life lessons to impart to viewers.

It's never easy being the new kid in school, largely because of that one bully who makes it his mission to harass and establish his dominance over everyone  especially newbies. For Billy (Luke Benward), it starts with a major glaring session upon arrival and quickly builds up to a thermos filled not with a delicious Kool-Aid type drink but a whole gob of nasty, disgusting worms, all of it courtesy of Joe (Adam Hicks), who sits atop the classmate food chain. Billy makes the spontaneous decision to play it cool, claiming that he eats worms all the time, then closes with a perfect toss of one worm into Joe's face. Yes, it looks like a small triumph for the little guy over the big bad bully, but the resulting taunts of "Worm boy" soon compel Billy to make the fatal mistake of "the bet." Before he knows what he's doing, he's bet Joe that he can eat ten worms on Saturday, with the loser having to come to school with a bucket load of worms in his pants.

As Billy's new friend Erika (Hallie Kate Eisenberg) often says, boys are just weird. Joe's gang goes all out to come up with some of the most disgusting fried worm delicacies they can imagine (don't ask me why they think it's harder to eat a fried worm than a squishy live one). The levers of power shift as Billy manages to stay in the game, everyone seems to learn something about himself along the way, and the outcome of the bet doesn't seem all that important when all is said and done. Don't judge anyone too quickly stands among this film's various lessons to all of us, but it will obviously play best to boys and girls who can personally relate to the vagaries of playground dominance that give rise to such silly yet all-important contests as Billy's worm-eating challenge.