Creepy Crawly Number 7 - The Tick (that Mutated and got Big)
Ticks
* The creepy crawly up for show; in the Californian
wilderness, the lush green forest is home to tall pine trees, beautiful
mountain, and ticks! Usually only measuring about 2 millimetres in size, one of them wonders into a barn that’s a chemical lab growing
steroid enhanced marijuana. The tick gets some of the growth accelerant on it
and grows five times it’s actual size in just a day. And as ticks breed in the
thousands and even millions, it doesn’t take long before the woods are infested
with the nippers, who are angry, and in search of blood.
* How they are portrayed in this film; the appearance, movements and behaviours of ticks as we know them today is replicated fairly well in this film, given it’s an early 90s B grade horror movie. It doesn’t try to reinvent the tick itself, rather just aggravate its motives and send them on a killing spree.
* The humans who try to squash them; our helpless humans caught in the middle of all this are actually inner-city youths, who have been taken to a remote camp site by two social workers to help them bond and enjoy life. None of them want to be there, with their hip, cool attitudes and short tempers. One of the main young people Todd (played by Seth Green), is more uncomfortable than any of them being there, given a bad experience he had camping in the woods as a kid. But he, and the rest of the untruly youth, will have to get over their fears and themselves in order to survive.
* The grossest moment; there are plenty of gory moments in the film, and it
doesn’t hold back from the gore. In an extension of normal tick behaviour,
where in reality the tiny insects burrow into your skin, the mutated versions
here “enter” humans, and become even bigger, exploding out of them and
continuing on their rampage. The effects are all practical here, with no use of
CGI or green screens. The film obviously had a low budget, with amateur
filmmakers behind the scenes and an emerging cast still finding their acting
chops. But once you look past the stilted performances and lack of filmmaking
skills, you can still enjoy this little monster caper; something of a quiet
achiever in the realm of Creepy Crawly movies.
Not a box office hit in it’s
time or even a cult favourite, but I enjoyed it all the same. The idea is
original, the filmmakers went to some effort creatively, and it’s a short 85
minutes long with a few surprise twists along the way, and some exciting scenes
towards the end. If you don’t like the idea of any kind of bugs that can burrow
into your skin and make you itch, then avoid Ticks – it will get under your
skin and make you squirm.
No comments:
Post a Comment