Ticks (1993)

Time for a good old fashioned B-Movie creature feature, and insect focused ones are often quite popular so let's check out 1993's Ticks!  Produced by Brian Yuzna,  king of the independent horror films of the 90's.  There is a certain charm to these low budget direct to video horror films that just is lacking in today's digital age.  You can just tell so much more work went into some of these productions in large part to having to be mostly all practical effects.  Ticks is full of creepy tick puppets and gross out gore that just isn't the same now with all these CG intensive monster flicks that get pumped out on a weekly basis.

Seth Green teaches Carlton how to burn Ticks

Our cast of characters are a bunch of troubled teens going on a weekend camping trip with a couple of social workers.  This movie features a young Seth Green and Alfonso Ribeiro of Fresh Prince fame.  Ribeiro plays a street tough named Panic and it totally doesn't work, come on it's Carlton!  Along with Carlton trying to be tough, we got Clint Howard playing the creepy pot farmer who causes the Ticks to mutate thanks to his food growth formula.  Can't complain about more Clint Howard!  Everyone is pretty bad in this.  The Teens have issues which are introduced with toss away lines and really it has no importance to the actual plot or how their characters act as we just needed victims to go on this trip.

So we got giant ticks running around the woods being all creepy like real ticks are.  They burrow into people and suck blood so we get all kinds of instances of Ticks digging around in people.  Apparently when Ticks are enlarged they also become super fast and love to jump at people.  Like most creature flicks of this type, we always find one or two of the titled bugs at first and as the film progresses we are swarmed with them.  And yes you get hordes of ticks eventually.  The Tick's creature effects are simple but work out pretty well.  Combine the creepiness of ticks with Yuzna film's gross out gore and you get a good amount of "ewww" going on in your film.  It's pretty cringey when you have people ripping off the hooked on ticks, ripping skin and the large amounts of flowing blood.  Good times.

A little too much Clint Howard maybe

The ticks themselves don't seem like a huge menace at first, especially with how big they are and really they bite and stick to a person, but folks just pull them off constantly in this.  How anyone actually dies in this is kinda odd with how ineffective the things are.  We do get a few folks and animals who get infested with burrowing ticks which is gross and leads to fun explosions of body parts.  Clint Howard becomes a breeding ground of Ticks and he becomes extra gross as a pulsating tick farm.  The movie also shows us tick's weakness to fire as most know that is how you kill a real tick easily since they can be tough buggers to kill.  Oddly the giant ticks are pretty easy to kill, they squish with ease and are dispatched in large amounts.  But still to make it even easier our characters have to resort to fire which just causes ticks to explode into goo.  Apparently just being within an inch of fire causes ticks to explode.

Ticks is an alright little movie as long as you know what you are getting.  Swarming giant bug movies are pretty common and most are garbage, but this is maybe a slight upgrade to the common crap we get.  The gore and practical effects elevate this above many others and it could have been a more fun movie but the character are so so wooden.  Everyone is so boring and there is a complete lack of any personality to the characters.  To spice things up there is a group of criminals but they are just as boring as the rest and all they do is make things worse for our cast of characters in the middle of a giant tick invasion.  Think the movie needed more Clint Howard or someone with personality cause even Seth Green is a bore here.  Ticks feels like it needed to choose a direction and be extra hammy as a creature feature, or try to make the film have a lighter tone.  The movie just is kinda dull and maybe too serious for it's subject matter. 

Yes, there is a giant MEGA TICK