(Spoiler alert: Do not read on if you haven’t seen the movie “Snatched.”)
In her new movie “Snatched,” Amy Schumer plays a character who’s infected by a giant, gross-looking tapeworm while traveling with her mother (Goldie Hawn) in Ecuador — and then has it extracted in a memorable gross-out scene.
But could a tapeworm really be lured out of a person with a lump of meat? Not really, according to Brian Louden, from Science Channel’s MythBusters.
“Luckily, this entire idea is from the imagination of a creative individual who took already scream-inducing diseases and created a terrifying chimera,” he told TheWrap.
In the movie, mother-daughter duo Schumer and Goldie Hawn are lost in the Ecuadoran jungle running away from bad guys when Schumer contracts a tapeworm. A local doctor says they must lure it out with a piece of meat — leading the the emergence of a huge, CGI’d tapeworm crawling up and out of her throat.
When she discovers that a giant tapeworm is dangling out of her throat, she panics and runs around the hut.
“I have to go out on a limb and assume this is an as of yet undiscovered creature based on your description,” Louden said. “It appears to have aspects of both guinea worm and tapeworm. Although neither is lured out for treatment, the guinea worm is wrapped painstakingly and painfully around a stick until extracted. And can be up to 100 cm [39 inches] long. That is about a yard.
“I like the idea that it wants to eat some meat but the truth is we are the meat to it,” he continued. “We can say for some unknown reason it is a trait unique to this species. But we know that it is called a tapeworm and guinea worms don’t live in the digestive tract.”
Louden added, “Or were you asking if Amy Schumer would flip out and run if she had a giant tapeworm coming out of her throat? To that I say, Who wouldn’t?”
Screenwriter Katie Dippold told TheWrap in an interview that the idea for the tapeworm came from an NPR story about someone having to extract a guinea worm from a woman’s nipple.
“When I started writing about the jungle, where Emily [Schumer] thought she was on this beautiful journey with rainbows and sunsets and stuff, I thought, ‘What would be my worst nightmare?’ And then it hit me — having a tapeworm is my nightmare.”