Can of Worms

The 1999 DCOM film, “Can of Worms” is about a boy named Mike, played by Michael Shulman, who is not happy with his life on Earth. He sends out a message to space for help to escape Earth and gets more than he asked for when aliens actually arrive.

Elena Square Eyes said in her review, “I can safely say that if I had watched Can of Worms as a child, I wouldn’t have liked it just how I don’t like it now. I feel like the poster and even the short promo is misleading as the aliens don’t make an appearance until almost 50 minutes into the film. Plus, I was thinking there’d be a can of space worms or something but really the title is a reference to the phrase “opened a can of worms” aka have done something that has caused things to be far more unpleasant, difficult and problematic than you might’ve first intended.”

Mike’s life isn’t all that bad before the aliens arrive. He has a crush on the head cheerleader (Erika Christensen), has some rivalry with one of the players on his football team (Marcus Turner), and he’s a computer genius who loves to write sci-fi stories, but he isn’t the most hated kid in school or the one nobody acknowledges. He has friends (Adam Wylie and Andre Ducote) and a nice family (Garrett M. Brown, Lee Garlington, Brighton Hertfort), and when one thing goes wrong, he sends a message to space asking for someone to take him away. It’s overexaggerated.

When the aliens do arrive, there is some nice animatronics effects but a lot of them are childish with fart and vomit jokes. Elena admitted, “At least there’s a talking alien dog called Barnabus (voiced by Malcolm McDowell who wasn’t someone I was expecting to find in a Disney Channel Original Movie) who is pretty cool and helpful. Anything with a dog automatically goes up in my expectations a bit to be honest. Though Barnabus was pretty much the only character with commonsense so he had that going for him too.”

The pacing for “Can of Worms” was off. It spends a lot of time on Mike’s every day life which can get boring and then when the eccentrics start it’s almost overwhelming as there are so many different aliens at once. Elena noted, “Then Mike and his friends have to go on a rescue mission into an alien’s home world which kind of feels tacked on as otherwise it would be plain bureaucracy that would get Mike out of this mess he’s caused.” Clearly, they needed more action at the end to try and keep viewers interested.

Elena ended her review by saying, “Not a fan of Can of Worms at all and I don’t think this one is a case of being roughly two decades older than the target audience.”

I believe I was the wrong age group for this movie. If you have little kids, then they can enjoy this fine. However, I don’t think adults will be watching this movie after only seeing it once. This is not a movie for everyone, and I am clearly not one of them. This movie just seems unrelatable to the teen life, so that’s why I say skip this one over.

Tomorrow I will look at another unbelievable DCOM in “Disney Month 2024.”