Ick

A mysterious parasitic organism begins to terrorize a small American town, but no one seems to mind too much as high school students are preparing for prom. Ick is kind of Night of the Creeps combined with The Blob and spiced with nostalgia for high school comedies from around 2000, which actually sounds cool. Joseph Kahn puts on a very wild and frenetic show, but gets bogged down in annoying genre clichés, not-so-funny attempts at humor, and scenes that are longer and more repetitive than they should be. The high body-count and the extravagance of the practical effects sequences are quite admirable, but the associated CGI effects, which are as jarring as they are overdone, do a lot to harm it. (2024-10-06)

A slightly above-average old-school horror comedy that’s enticing at the beginning due to its brisk narrative and nimble editing, but then, in a story about a parasitic mass engulfing a small American town, it focuses too much on the annoyingly affected storyline about a teacher who discovers that one of his students may be his daughter, so he tries to protect her and gives her unsolicited fatherly advice. The exaggeration and seriousness are not very well balanced, the characters are one-dimensional and the computer-generated special effects are terrible. However, the film has a fast pace and plenty of action. The humour of varying quality works when it takes aim at politically correct trends. The titular, seemingly extraterrestrial parasite, which has been tormenting the town for years while pretending to be harmless so that people get used to it and adapt to it, but then went wild and began growing even through people, is of intentionally unclear or even abstract origin, so you can give it any metaphorical interpretation that you choose. Ick is an easily digestible treat. (2024-10-05)