How to Eat Fried Worms (2006)

Sorry, this movie sucks

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This is a pretty bad movie. It looks really cheap and all the actors are terrible. I'm not just talking about the child actors, everyone here is pretty bad. Overall the movie is just gross and pointless. The only reason why I watched this is because my brother read the book and wanted to see the movie. Apparently it is extremely inaccurate to the book. I don't really care, but even fans of this nonsense don't like it.

If you like films about school bullies, brave children, hilarious toddlers and worm eating, then How to Eat Fried Worms will appeal to you.The film is about a boy named Billy, who when arriving on his first day at a new school, discovers that some of his classmates have played a prank on him by putting worms into his lunch. The school bully, Joe and his "team" of friends start teasing Billy and calling him "worm boy".Billy decides to play along by saying that "he eats worms all the time". Joe and his friends don't believe him but Billy assures them and bets Joe that he can eat ten worms in one day otherwise he will come to school with worms in his pants.The boys take Billy up on his bet, leaving the weak stomached child with a mission to gain respect from his classmates by eating worms cooked, fried, or alive.The film may sound gross but there are a lot of messages in it. For one, it portrays true friendship and how to accept people for who they are. It also shows you why some bullies resort to bullying other children.The film's protagonist, Billy is a strong minded and brave person who all of us can relate to. It is easy to empathize with him as we silently cheer for him to reach his goal, even though we might not always agree with what he's doing or the choices he makes.The children in the film are portrayed exactly how children are in real life and the film deserves a lot of credit for that. The child actors are the stars of this show, showing true emotion and feeling than most other children's movies portray.Some adults may not enjoy this film but kids will, perhaps even teenagers.There are hardly any other good movies on circuit at the moment, so if you're not in the mood to see snakes on a plane, try worms on a plate in How to Eat Fried Worms. It is a feel good fun film and not just Fear Factor for kids.

I have to admit I did not finish this movie because it was so amazingly stupid and not worth watching. I watched it with a room full of kids, who also were not laughing at the stupid and crude humor. The director, Bob Dolman, seems to be so obsessed with sphincters and genitalia that it overrides the real story that I grew up with. THIS IS NOT A GOOD FILM FOR KIDS! Besides the fact that the content is so crude, the movie is just stupid has bad flow and has no intelligence behind it. What a waste of a perfectly good story. If you read the book when you were younger and loved it, then don't waste your time watching a movie that so badly botches it that it makes you angry. Buy your kids the book instead.

Watching the commercials for this movie, I was fairly convinced that I was going to loathe it. For one thing, it was one of those "loosely based on the novel" movies, which usually means that the book author saw the script, hated it, and refused to be associated with the film. Worse, the trailer showed only the most mundane slapstick imaginable (ex: kid gets squirted in the face with a garden hose...and falls over). So when my little brother got it into his mind that this was the "must see" film of the season (of course, he thought the same thing about "Cars", "Over the Hedge", "The Ant Bully", "Monster House", etc, etc), I was admittedly less than thrilled.But once at the theater, the film won me over for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the writers capture 'kid dialogue' better than just about any other children's film I've ever seen. A prime example of this comes directly after the boys' principal accidentally eats a worm stuck in an egg omelet. The boys do a lame, over-exaggerated impression of the principal lecturing them, which makes it realistic since all little kids think (mistakenly) that they do great mocking expressions of their adult tormentors. Then one of the boys asks, "Why did he say, 'alley oop'?" Another boy responds, "Maybe he's crazy!" and the entire group laughs uproariously. Not an overly witty rejoinder, but exactly the kind of thing a young kid would come up with on the spot and exactly the type of remark other kids his age would find hilarious. As if to confirm it, my kid brother laughed right on cue when they were spoken on-screen; I could practically hear his voice spouting the same exact lines if he was placed in a similar situation.Another reason the movie works is that the writers manage to work in issues like bullying, sibling relationships, the new kid in school, and peer pressure/conformity without making any of them seem as though they were subplots for some after school special. For example, the bully (Joe) isn't stereotypical; he's definitely bad but not pure evil, and just enough of his home-life is revealed that the audience feels sympathy for him and understands his bullying origins. There's also no "cue the dramatic music" moment where Billy ('Worm Boy') realizes what a complete tool he's being to his younger brother Woody, and yet, by the end of the movie, some type of minor transformation has been made. There's some realism here in the way the characters resolve situations and in the way they relate to each other, and very little of it comes across as corny.The only drawback to the movie comes in the form of an absolutely laughable dance scene that even the creators of the infamous McDonald's dance party in "Mac and Me" would scoff at. Why oh why was it put into the movie?? Did Austin Rogers (Adam) pull a Macaulay Culkin and refuse to take the role unless he was given a vehicle to showcase his oh so impressive dancing skills? The entire sequence definitely did not need to be there and had slightly less comedic value than any given show on "The History Channel".Overall, though, this movie was excellent, and the length (about an hour and twenty minutes) was just about perfect. One of the best, most realistic live action kid films you'll ever see if you're ever around children or just remember what being a kid was actually like.