July 29, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Joseph Kahn
Culture Representation: Taking place mostly in 2024 (with brief scenes taking place from 2006 through the 2010s), in the fictional city of Eastbroke, Kansas, the horror comedy film “Ick” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few black people, Latin people and Asians) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A science teacher at a high school and some of his students (one of whom might be his daughter) get caught up in fighting off a deadly mass of tentacles known as the Ick.
Culture Audience: “Ick” will appeal primarily to people who fans of “creature feature” horror movies and don’t mind if the story is poorly written with characters who have two-dimensional personalities.
“Ick” is an incoherent and uneven mess of a horror movie. It doesn’t know if it wants to be a family drama and a gross-out comedy, in addition to being about a mass of tentacles that go on a murderous rampage and turn people into zombies. The editing is manic in the first third of the movie, turns sluggish in the middle of the movie, and then becomes a predictable horror story with a series of kill scenes inspired by the 1958 horror classic “The Blob.” Much of “Ick” just seems to exist to be a nostalgia soundtrack for early-to-mid 2000s pop/rock music.
Directed by Joseph Kahn, “Ick” co-written by Kahn, Dan Koontz and Samuel Laskey. The movie had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. “Ick” takes place in the fictional suburban city of Eastbrook, Kansas, mostly in 2024, with brief scenes taking place from 2006 through the 2010s.
“Ick” is told in chronological order and begins sometime in 2006, when Hank Wallace (played by Brandon Routh) is a star football player for Eastbrook High School. Hank seems to be having an ideal life at high school: He and his cheerleader girlfriend Staci (played by Mena Suvari) are very popular and have been crowned king and queen of their prom. (Routh and Suvari have de-aging visual effects in these scenes.)
Eastbrook has several seaweed-like clumps of tentacles that are in various places around the city. The locals call this mysterious mass the Ick. In the beginning of the movie, the Ick is considered an ugly, tangled blight that seems to be a non-poisonous waste substance.
It’s mentioned in the movie that there is no origin story for the Ick. It’s just another way of saying that the screenwriters were too lazy and not creative enough to come up with an origin story. The only thing that’s known about the Ick is that it keeps getting larger every year.
One day, before a football game, Staci says to Hank that she has something important to tell him. The movie never shows what she told Hank. But during the game, Hank sees Staci making out in the stands with a classmate named Ted Kim (played by Peter Wong), which causes Hank to get distracted. Just as that moment, some of the Ick reaches out from underneath the field and grabs Hank’s right ankle.
Hank falls down and breaks his right leg. He recovers from the injury but it permanently disables his right leg and he has to wear a leg brace. Things go from bad to worse for Hank: His widower father Andy Wallace (played by Jeff Fahey) dies of a heart attack. Staci and Ted become a couple. Hank is working behind the counter of a drugstore when Staci and Ted buy a home pregnancy test that he has to ring up as a sale.
Through a series of montages, the movie shows that over the next several years, Hank became a recovering alcoholic, worked as a janitor at the high school, and later became a science teacher. Hank has become a sad sack loner who has never really gotten over the breakup with Staci. Hank doesns’t seem particularly interested in the flirtations of his co-worker Sofia Díaz (played by Mariann Gavelo), a school faculty member who has a sassy personality.
In 2024, Staci and Ted are a married couple who are successful realtors. Their 18-year-old daughter Grace (played by Malina Weissman), who is a talented student and somewhat sarcastic, is in her last year at Eastbrook High School. Hank wonders if Grace (who is one of his students) could be his biological child. He confronts Staci about it, and she vehemently denies that Hank is Grace’s father. But could Staci be lying to protect her image of having the “perfect” family?
Hank’s glory days were in high school, before his right leg was broken, which is why the soundtrack music of “Ick” is filled with songs from bands that had their biggest hits in the early-to-mid 2000s. The movie’s soundtrack includes songs from the All-American Rejects (“Swing, Swing”), Good Charlotte (“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”), Blink-182 (“All the Small Things”), Chevelle (“The Red”), Plain White T’s (“Hey There Delilah”), Fountains of Wayne (“Stacy’s Mom”), Creed (“With Arms Wide Open”) and Hoobastank (“The Reason”). The 2000s nostalgia is all over the movie, including a subplot about Eastwood High School in 2024 having a 2000s-themed school dance.
Two of Hank’s other students, who become an important part of the story, look like they’re stuck in a youth culture fashion time warp. Heather (played by Taia Sophia), who is moody and wears heavy eye liner, looks like an emo girl from 2004. Griffin (played by Zeke Jones)—with his long hair, flannel shirt and ski cap—looks like he stepped out of a grunge rock video from 1994. Heather and Griffin, who are “misfits” at school, end up being romantically attracted to each other in a very dull romance.
Grace has a classmate boyfriend named Dylan (played by Harrison Cone), who has a caricature-like personality. Dylan is condescending when spouting politically correct preaching so that he can appear to be “enlightened” and “progressive” feminist. But Dylan is actually a jerk who is inclined to cheat on Grace if given the opportunity and if he thinks he won’t get caught.
There’s also a brief spoof of Alex Jones’ Infowars, with a scene featuring an Infosys social media channel and its conspiracy theorist host (played by Mike Capozzi), who claims that the Ick can improve sexual potency. In response to the growing Ick plague, several of the citizens of Eastbrook react to quarantines in the way that many politically conservative people reacted to government-mandated COVID-19 quarantines, including getting into angry rants at town hall meetings. The movie’s parodies of “woke” and neo-conservative cultures has limp jokes that sound like rejects from amateur comedians.
The rest of the movie stumbles and fumbles along with this paternity drama and some useless high school scenes until the real action starts. With no explanation, the Ick grows to alarming proportions and begins attacking the people of Eastbrook by turning them into zombies. Even though it’s the best part of the movie, it’s still not enough to make up for the flimsy plot, unimpressive acting, hollow characters, disjointed direction, and a cop-out ending that doesn’t give answers to a big unresolved part of the story.
Fathom Entertainment released “Ick” for a limited engagement in U.S. cinemas on July 25, July 27, July 28, and July 29, 2025.
