In the film Maggots (2019), fracking is causing earthworms to mutate into 9 feet long monsters. The fracking teams are using some kind of new chemical that can “completely reprogram genomic sequences.” How a chemical could do that, or what that even means, is not explained.
A group of college students, who all appear to be in their 30s, go to the forest to investigate. The students are all quite insufferable. We’ve got the loser, the good girl, the horny couple and a dude who is straight from a Troma film. The maggots start attacking them and other people that are around.
Speaking of Troma, the film doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sometimes it’s like a standard creature feature made-for-TV film, sometimes it’s a Troma film, sometimes the director thinks he is Sam Raimi. I’m not a fan of the over-the-top wackiness of Troma films, so it made the film disjointed for me, although Troma fans probably like it. The acting is generally on a Troma level.
The mutated worms look kind of like the creatures from The Deadly Spawn (1983), short and fat maggots with teeth. The movie gets props for having them being mostly practical effects, although probably done out of necessity since they look like shit when they are CGI; one scene is so bad it’s straight from Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010).
They should have saved up some money to get someone to score the film, since there is literally nothing as annoying as a film that just has one guitar riff on loop, like Maggots has. If you want a worm animal attack film, watch Squirm (1976) instead.
