By David Savage

One of the most idiosyncratic and inventive voices of genre filmmaking to emerge in the 1970s was Jeff Lieberman (born 1947), whose three best known films, Squirm (1976)  Blue Sunshine (1978) and Just Before Dawn (1981) have become classics of horror and sci-fi. Cited as an influence on such directors as Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino (the latter lists Squirm as an essential viewing if he’s to take you seriously), Lieberman’s filmmaking captures the low-budget resourcefulness of Roger Corman and combines it with a singular point of view -- one that seems both quirky and at times, deliriously demented.

Here at Cinema Retro, these are exactly the types of directors we enjoy tipping our hat to. So I’m excited to announce that I’ve organized a tribute to Lieberman built around these three films with the generous participation and hosting of Anthology Film Archives in New York City, where the retrospective will take place, August 17-19th. (www.anthologyfilmarchives.org)

“3 X Jeff Lieberman” will mark the first time these three films have been screened in 35mm in New York since their theatrical premieres, a remarkable event considering how much word-of-mouth cachet each has, like prized baseball trading cards for cult film fans.

“It all comes down to story,” Lieberman often says in interviews, and watching these three films, it’s clear why. All three cohere around a tight, well crafted narrative that does not look to the supernatural as the locus of horror, but at the inherently corrupt nature of people as a means to bespoil nature and society. It’s a tough-minded, cynical worldview that runs throughout his work, and the man himself. Perhaps updating the famous line from Sartre’s No Exit, “hell is other people,” Lieberman’s work is shot through with an even simpler maxim: Humanity is horror.

Lieberman’s first film credit was co-authoring the screenplay for the police thriller Blade (1973), directed by his mentor Ernest Pintoff, but his debut as a writer-director came in 1976 when his AIP-distributed Squirm burst upon drive-in screens and became a sizeable hit, considering its low budget. The fictional town of Fly Creek, Georgia is terrorized by a killer worm infestation after a thunderstorm, which sends power lines crashing to the ground and electrifying the ground -- and thousands of earthworms -- in the process. As a result, they go on a killer rampage, invading homes and most shockingly, burrowing into their victims’ skin. It stars a young Don Scardino (Cruising, He Knows You’re Alone) as Mick, the interloping city-slicker beau of Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy) the local redhead beauty of Fly Creek. Together with Geri’s sister Alma (Fran Higgins), they attempt to survive the killer worm onslaught overnight, without power and without a clue as to what has happened to nature.

Squirm -- still Lieberman’s most popular film -- feels like a double-feature twin to 1972’s Frogs (1972, with Sam Elliott), another swampy, “nature’s revenge” tale of eco-horror put out by AIP.  Featuring early makeup work by eventual seven-time Oscar-winner Rick Baker, and co-starring thousands of real worms, the film was shot on location in Port Wentworth, Georgia and aside from Don Scardino, used a cast made up mostly of locals, who contribute to its earthy and authentic atmosphere, not unlike the drive-in mainstay The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), which was shot in similar circumstances. And speaking of earthy, we should pay special tribute to the actors, who braved thousands and thousands of real live earthworms on set. Not a rubber worm among them! The original idea, Lieberman revealed to an interviewer this year, came from a real event. His brother, in order to get earthworms out of the ground, electrified the soil inserting a electric model train transformer into the soil. When they slithered out, they noticed they burrowed back in when light was shined on them. But are earthworms scary? Not in real life, but as Lieberman explained: “I had to go to great lengths to make [the worms] scary, because they’re not scary...until you’re shown otherwise you can just step on it. So I had to make that scary by it burrowing into the face...so that was the big assignment and I guess it worked.” An interesting footnote: When a 25 year-old Lieberman wrote the original title on a legal pad, (then spelled Skworm) and sketched down a paragraph containing the story, he showed it to his wife. “She said it was the stupidest idea she’d ever heard. Two years later we’re buying a house with the money that Squirm built.”

Sony has just released the new full length trailer for the new James Bond film, Skyfall, as well as these two new photos showing Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem. This one emphasizes plot line as much as action sequences and features quite a bit of footage of Bardem as the villain Silva. There are some spectacularly filmed shots by cinematographer Roger Deakins and very intriguing scenarios. They also resurrect the James Bond theme, a welcome addition that we hope extends to the feature film. Bring it on! Click here to view