Ticks (aka Infested) Review

Disclaimer: Contains spoilers!

Plot Summary: Teens staying in the woods find themselves tormented by giant, mutated ticks.

Review: I didn't expect much from a movie called "Ticks" and, well, it didn't deliver much either. Personally, I hate ticks a lot. Stupid fucking parasites...the worst kind of creature. The only reason why I wasted my time with this was to see my darling Ami Dolenz in action once more. Unfortunately for me, and fans of Ms. Dolenz, her role in this film is minor, only speaking a few lines of dialogue. It's stupid too, because her name is headlined in the opening credits and she's on the cover for the movie; you'd think she would be the main star, but you would be sorely mistaken. It's worse though, she's in the background looking smoking hot quite often, but we're never treated to a chance to bask in her glory. She's even in a bikini at one point and instead we get closeups of her dumb boyfriend. WHAT?! What a tease. Fuck this movie.

The story is about the level of ridiculousness you would expect from a direct to video movie about giant ticks. Random bad guys growing marijuana are using a home brew herbal steroid that has the unexpected side effect of mutating the ticks in the surrounding woodland. At the same time, random teens from the "inner city" are brought on some kind of character building camping trip? Hell if I know. Oh the '90s and the drama of tough city life. Besides my dear Ms. Dolenz, you have a few oddball appearances like Seth Green, as the main kid, and Alfonso "Carlton" Ribeiro as the only teen to die. That leads me to another problem, you set up these characters to die and then only one of them does?! In fact, only a handful of people die which includes the pointlessly added bad guys growing the weed. Yeah, believe it or not, the main threat of the movie turns out to be the bad guys more than the ticks. And how on earth have the ticks spread so fast anyway? It's like one minute there's one, then all of a sudden the entire forest is overrun. None of this even matters, because everyone is seemingly invincible. People get stabbed, shot, ran over, and they get right back up like it's a tiny scrape. For example, Carlton experiences exposure after spending all night outside, is infected by a tick that makes you hallucinate from a neurotoxin, is infested by a tick who somehow grows in his body, is beaten up profusely by the bad guys, shot with a shotgun in the stomach, and still manages to survive all day and night with these wounds before finally dying (apparently he took one steroid and this explains it all, right?). Hell, one of the bad guys is run over by a van that pushes him through a cabin wall and he gets up like you lightly pushed him. Mr. Green's character has spider-sense too or, I guess, tick-sense in this case, whereby he senses danger. One of the girls brings up casually out of the blue she was raped. There's father-daughter angst shit while the dad just wants nookie from his, uh, assistant or whatever she is. Clint Howard is playing Clint Howard...I mean, seriously, what the fuck is going on here? In case you're wondering, they take Alfred's advice from "The Dark Knight" and burn down the forest to beat the ticks. I really liked how the biggest tick somehow blew up out of nowhere too. And big shock, the movie ends with one tick egg making it back to the city...oh noooo! Isn't that like the default ending to a giant bug movie?

This movie is bad, no doubt about that, but it is kind of amusing in an over the top kind of way. The tick effects are surprisingly not bad, and there's ample blood and gore when something finally happens. There are actually real actors present, but I'm sure they would love to forget this point of their lives. Of course the best part for me is seeing Ms. Dolenz, but I would have enjoyed this thoroughly had she been the center of the action. As such, if you're seeking this out as a fan of Ms. Dolenz, don't bother since you will be missing out on nothing; stick to things like "Miracle Beach" and "Stepmonster" for unbridled Dolenz-action. Other than that, if you're interested in giant bug movies, I suppose you may enjoy this more than I.

Notable Moment: When the one bad guy just stands there and lets himself get run over by a van. I guess since he's a superhuman, who gets right back up like it was nothing at all, it doesn't even matter, huh?

Final Rating: 4/10

Not nearly enough Dolenz-action to keep me satisfied: