By John Corrado

The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 5th to 15th, more information can be found right here.

Former music video director Joseph Kahn follows up his raucous 2017 battle rap satire Bodied with Ick; a sci-fi horror comedy that serves as homage to stereotypical early-2000s high school movies, starring Brandon Routh in a sort of comeback role.

The film starts with Routh’s Hank Wallace going from popular high school quarterback to washed up has-been over the course of a montage. Hank is living the dream; he has a promising athletic career, and is dating the head cheerleader Staci (Mena Suvari). But that all changes when he busts his ankle and gets injured during a big football game, tripping over the “Ick,” a vine-like alien substance growing up from the ground that just appeared one day.

And this is the high-concept kick behind Kahn’s Ick; it’s set in a town that has been embroiled in a slow-moving takeover by an alien substance for so long that everybody has decided to just ignore it and act like it’s no longer there (the film is pretty clearly a COVID-era satire). The injury upends Hank’s high school life, derailing his football career, and prompting Staci to leave him for the nerdy Asian guy, Ted Kim (Peter Wong).

Flash-forward to present day, and Hank is now the high school science teacher, while Ted lived out of his dream of marrying Staci, with their teenaged daughter Grace (Melina Pauli Weissman) being in Hank’s class. Meanwhile, the Ick has remained pervasive around the town, and when the alien growth enters its “kinetic phase,” it starts rapidly expanding its reach and infecting people.

This is when Khan turns Ick into full-blown sci-fi actioner, including an amusing sequence where the alien substance takes over a high school house party. Khan employs his usual hyperkinetic filmmaking style, including a number of well-placed needle drops (in this case, Ick features a pop-punk soundtrack that provides the right level of nostalgia). Because of this, the film’s pacing can feel all over the place, just sort of kicking into high gear when it gets bored of the earlier rhythm.

The screenplay, which Kahn co-wrote with Sam Laskey and Dan Koontz does try to find some room for a more dramatic family story that isn’t entirely ineffective, thanks to nice performances from Routh and Weissman. But the one-note supporting characters come off as underdeveloped. The film is mainly concerned with offering a steady stream of one-liners and alien carnage, as the Ick turns people into zombies and explodes them from the inside.

It’s also an unsubtle but amusing satire, in that South Park style of mocking everyone (if you follow Kahn on Twitter/X, the humour is very on-brand for him). When the army comes to take control and warn everyone to stay inside, the townsfolk revolt at the government telling them what to do, and the prospect of needing to cancel prom. But Kahn also pokes fun at “wokeness” and hypersensitive Gen Z-ers; Grace’s boyfriend (Harrison Cone) is a virtue-signalling male feminist douche who weaponizes his progressive, left-wing ideologies to put down others. It’s a funny enough gag to work.

The sound mix is a bit wonky and the visual effects can be spotty, but it’s easy to imagine that a few of these things will be fixed before the film gets released (Khan noted that he had just finished the final cut of the film the day before premiering it at TIFF, and the Midnight Madness screening was his first time watching it). It’s uneven in places, and not as sharp in its commentary as Kahn’s Bodied. But Ick is more entertaining than not as an earnest B-movie throwback, and mostly fun as a midnight movie.

Film Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)

Public Screenings: Saturday, September 7th, 11:59 PM at Royal Alexandra Theatre; Sunday, September 8th, 9:30 PM at Scotiabank Theatre; Wednesday, September 11th, 9:40 PM at Scotiabank Theatre