Wormtown
Director: Sergio Pinheiro
Date Created: 2025-09-27 20:42
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Pros
- Practical effects
- Roy Rossovich's cinematography nails the aesthetic
- Opening act delivers body horror dread
- Blurred scenes and gore work better than they have any right to
- Strongest asset is its willingness to feel grimy and uncomfortable
Cons
- Narrative incoherence that derails the entire premise
- Pacing drags despite 106-minute runtime
- Cult motivations are never clearly established
- Bizarre characters that kill the momentum
- You never care what happens to anyone
- Film Title: Wormtown
- Cast: Caitlin McWethy (Jess), Rachel Ryu (Kara), Emily Soppe (Rose), Maggie Lou Rader (Alice), Madison Murrah (Susanna), Jordan Mullins (The Rancher), A.J. Baldwin (The Dudette), Jim Azelvandre (Major Joshua), Louie Kurtzman (Hans), Milo McDonald (Tommy), Beau Roberts (The Technician)
- Director: Sergio Pinheiro
- Writer: Andrew James Myers
- Cinematographer: Roy Rossovich
- Distribution: Cranked Up Films
- Production: Good Deed Entertainment
- Release Date: September 27, 2025 (Chicago Horror Film Festival); November 7, 2025 (Internet) / Streaming options below
- Review by: Mother of Movies
This review contains plot references and thematic spoilers. We discuss the infection mechanics, character arcs, and the film’s bizarre third-act pivot. Watch it cold if you want the full confusion.
“Wormtown” is a grimy, premise that sinks under the weight of its own narrative incoherence. Sergio Pinheiro’s body horror film opens with unsettling imagery, a mayor’s pupils teeming with parasites, a child dying in the street as worms exit every orifice, effects that feel gritty. The visual language is there. The atmosphere is there. But somewhere between the opening act and the finale, the film forgets what story it’s actually telling. You’re left sitting through 106 minutes of increasingly bizarre choices that feel less like a coherent narrative and more like someone’s fever dream notes assembled into a feature.
The setup is solid enough: a cult worships mind-altering parasites. A town is infected. Three women, Jess, Kara, and Rose, are locked down, trying to survive. The practical effects work is genuinely okay. Plenty of worms. Plenty of dark red lighting and stark white frames. It feels like it gives you the ick, which is the film’s strongest play. The cinematography by Roy Rossovich leans into that aesthetic, using blurred scenes and gore to suggest body horror without the budget to fully realize it. I made a face when the worms burrowed into infected flesh, that part got the job done.
When the Infection Spreads to the Script
But here’s where it falls apart: the narrative doesn’t follow down the path of its own weirdness. The infected people develop some kind of hive consciousness, but the film never clearly establishes the rules of infection. The scope of the outbreak is one of the twists. Everyone inside Wormtown thought the spread was worldwide.
Kara agrees to being infected as retaliation for Jess having fallen on a dead child. As par for the course, she turns against her former friends. The logic is there, but the emotional connective tissue isn’t. Rose is also infected to punish Jess, her partner and is told to go to her Mormon family for rescue. It’s here the couple’s backstory is announced. However, the reason Rose tells her to go there is because, one of the ranchers says they never touch Mormons. I laughed. Not at the film’s intention, but at the sheer sideways nature of that plot turn. It’s so bizarre it circles back to unintentional comedy, and the film doesn’t seem to know it.
The pacing is tedious. I was bored by minute thirty, frustrated by minute sixty, and waiting for it to end after that. In the moment, I thought the runtime would kill it, and it did. There’s not enough visceral gross-out business to satisfy a gore hound, and the story is too bonkers sideways to engage anyone looking for a nice easy bug movie.
One-character (Rose’s sister who lives in the Mormon community that now consists of her and her brother) talks like she’s from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure because she watched the movie a hundred times with her Rose when they were kids. It’s bizarre. It’s unmotivated. It’s the kind of character quirk that feels like it wandered in from a different film.
Director Sergio Pinheiro and writer Andrew James Myers underline grimy, practical horror. However, this type of creature horror has to mean something. The film’s rhetoric about choice is too vague. The cult’s motivations are too murky and distanced from being a real threat. The infected’s behavior is inconsistent. By the third act, you’re not following a story, you’re watching someone’s nightmare logic unfold without internal consistency.
Worth the Crawl?
The performances are fine, but they’re working with material that doesn’t give them anywhere to go. Caitlin McWethy, Rachel Ryu, and Emily Soppe do what they can with Jess, Kara, and Rose, but the script doesn’t build character arcs, it builds plot points that happen to characters. The Rancher, The Dudette, Major Joshua, these feel like archetypes rather than people, and the film never bothers to make you care what happens to any of them.
Is Wormtown worth your time? Only if you’re a completist who needs to see every body-horror film that exists, or if you have a very high tolerance for plot interference dressed up in oozing things. If you’re looking for a parasite horror film that actually works, go back to Slither. Go watch The Blob. Go find something that knows that body horror works best when the story around it is locked down tight. Wormtown has the visuals and the unsettling premise, but it doesn’t have the discipline.
Rating and Verdict for Wormtown
Wormtown is rated
1.0 Ick factor premise, incoherent execution out of 5
Grimy Premise, Incoherent Execution
Wormtown opens with unsettling body horror visuals, but the narrative sinks under its own weirdness. Practical effects can’t save a plot that doesn’t make sense. This is grimy horror that forgot to earn its own strangeness.
Parasite Body Horror Films like Wormtown are:
- Slither (2006) — Parasite body horror that actually works. James Gunn balances gore, humor, and high stakes. Excellent effects, cosmic horror, and a story that knows exactly what it’s doing. This is what Wormtown wanted to be.
- The Blob (1988) — Creature horror with a small-town setting. Body invasion, spectacular effects for its age, and a balance between dread and dark comedy. Unsettling, and is astonishingly effective.
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) — Cult-like infection, paranoia, and a town slowly overtaken. Slow-burn horror that understands how to build narrative tension while exploring its premise.
- Shell (2025) — Lobster possession. Can’t get any stranger than that.
- Sting (2024) — Spiders and Australia.
- Creepy Crawley (2022) — Thai Horror with super-sized bugs.
Practical Effects Body Horror Movies – Wormtown 2025 Trailer
