A group of inner-city youths are gathered up and taken out to the wilderness to spend some time communing with good old Mother Nature as part of a program to help out troubled truants. Everything is going hunky-dory for the most part, other than intra-group squabbles and conflicts. Most of the kids don’t want to be there and despite the pluckiness of their adult chaperones, they don’t take to the woods and become a “family” like the program leaders hope they will. All of this changes with the introduction of a couple of backwoods pot-growers intent on protecting their crop, and the advent of mutated ticks that suddenly go on a rampage. The group must not only fight to survive against a couple of real-life outlaws, but they ticks are closing in, hungry for their blood. Can the teens band together and unite, or will their differences allow the ticks to literally tear them apart?
This is a pretty straight-forward set-up and the story unfolds how you might expect it to. There’s not really any surprises, other than the utter cruelty of the pot-farmers. They pull no punches, turning to guns and hostility almost instantly. So the threat is two-fold: the kids have to survive this vicious criminal element as well as repel this invading force of large tics. They work this dynamic well, as the tension that had been building slowly suddenly explodes. People that you don’t expect to die do and soon it is an all-out battle. Clint Howard turns in another great performance as yet another weirdo character. Peter Scolari seems to be phoning it in, collecting a paycheck while holding his nose; but he does fine enough. Seth Green displays that outsider/loner/geek vibe that will win him many further roles down the road. The ticks themselves are gooey and icky and gross and even if they look totally fake at times, they’re still pretty damned cool. This is basically an old-fashioned monster movie set in the early 90s and it works exactly like that.
Ticks is a fun little flick that won’t change the world or scare you to death or do much of anything other than deliver on what it promises: mutated ticks and blood. It delivers that in spades. It has an 80s ethos wrapped up in the serious gauze of grunge and depression. So yeah, if you haven’t seen it yet, give it a whirl. It is simple, to the point, direct fun.
★★✮☆