How to Eat Fried Worms: Critic Reviews

Fried Worms' appeal is right there in its title, only the second-best title of the month (after Snakes on a Plane) but still maybe the second-best title of all time.

The film version of Thomas Rockwell's 1973 book proves refreshingly free of the customary blights that affect most modern childrens movies, notably adult condescension.

Worms has its share of kid-friendly gross-outs but is actually a sweet-natured look at standing up to bullies.

It never manages, under the guidance of director Bob Dolman, to feel as if it's penetrated actual boys' lives.

If it grows more genial as it pokes along, it still feels like a lesser Nickelodeon special, with adults who are shrill cartoons and kids who are one-note character tics.

Here's hoping its old-fashioned sensibility appeals to contemporary kids, because we could certainly use more movies as smart and sweet as this one.

In too many kid-oriented films, the child actors mouth off like small, sassy adults -- Here, the kids, refreshingly, act like kids.

I hope life doesn't imitate art in the other fun movie opening this week, an adaptation of Thomas Rockwell's gross-out 1972 kids' classic How to Eat Fried Worms.

Issues like family harmony, justice, righting wrongs and telling the truth never go out of fashion and that comes across strong and clear in this less-than-perfect, but still solid, feel-good film.

If your stomach doesn't churn a bit after hearing the title of the children's movie How to Eat Fried Worms, the picture itself may finish the job.

An appealing juvenile cast distinguishes this otherwise uneven live-action adaptation of Thomas Rockwell's 1973 young adult book.

Kids won't get hit over the head with the messages, but they're not buried so deeply as to be indecipherable.

This is a decidedly old-fashioned family film that may prove too quaint for modern auds.

A blandly inoffensive 'After School Special'-type comedy based on a perennially popular children's book.

Fried Worms is a Hoot with more laughs, funny enough, so long as you don't consider the worm's point of view.

This is a story that could have gone way too far in the direction of the touching tale illustrating how kids overcome their fear of being ridiculed -- but instead maintains a buoyant irreverence.

What we have here is a 90-minute worm-eating contest, a spectacle that could be of interest only to robins, small-mouth bass and eight-to-11-year-old boys. Girls, don't bother. Parents and guardians, if you have to go, plan to take a nap.

...Isn't about or for anyone past puberty.

Think of it more as a milder, more palatable version of Fear Factor.

How to Eat Fried Worms is a lot tastier than its title implies.

A gross-out movie with a sweet story.