Review: Joseph Kahn’s eye-popping Ick is the horror-comedy Hollywood doesn’t realize it so desperately needs | Canada Voices

• Ick
• Directed by Joseph Kahn
• Written by Joseph Kahn, Dan Koontz and Samuel Laskey
• Starring Brandon Routh, Malina Pauli Weissman and Mena Suvari
• Classification N/A; 87 minutes
• Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival; screening at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Tex., this week, and other festivals throughout fall

Critic’s Pick

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Not that this ambition should be a surprise to anyone who is either following Kahn’s career or those who have been accidentally exposed to it. That first touch of the director’s 2004′s motorcycle flick, Torque, or 2011 neo-slasher Detention can alter your brain chemistry as much as a dunk into toxic chemicals or a radioactive spider bite, to reference just two of the pop-defining hits that feed into the director’s encyclopedia-sized cinematic sensibility.

Equal parts Evil Dead, The Blob, Gremlins, and American Pie, Kahn’s latest film smooshes together incendiary satire with sticky gore, as it charts the Born in the U.S.A. dreams of Hank Wallace (Brandon Routh), a high-school football star whose life descends into small-town mediocrity after enduring an on-field injury. After zipping through Hank’s back story in a series of frenetic flashback sequences, each new instance of his poor choices and bad luck sound-tracked by a blistering early-aughts pop-punk anthem, the film settles slightly down to focus on our hero’s current circumstances.

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Now a science teacher at his alma mater, Hank becomes obsessed with studying the passive alien slime that has been slowly covering the United States for the past two decades, including his anywhere town of Eastbrook. Of course, the ick of the title isn’t the kind of threat to stay dormant forever, and soon enough, Hank finds himself defending Eastbrook from carnage, with assistance (and sometimes hindrance) from his star student, Grace (Malina Pauli Weissman), and her mother/Hank’s high-school ex, Staci (Mena Suvari).

Once the set-up is complete, Kahn moves the story along with the kind of electric momentum that has seared his films and music videos – including work for Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey and Lady Gaga – so easily onto your brain. Every shot feels a few milliseconds shorter than audiences have come to expect, the director fully enlisted in the battle raging for our ever-diminishing attention spans.

And once the ick goes fully lethal – ripping apart teenage bodies without purpose or discrimination – the visceral delirium barely rests to catch its own breath. Compared with the rash of “elevated horror” films dominating today’s landscape, each slowed and slicked to assumed perfection, Ick moves like a runaway trolley, ignoring any contemporary dilemmas tied along its tracks.

But as much as Kahn delights in toggling the line between engaging and overwhelming the eye, Ick is a film rich in themes, even if its ideas are layered in between gobs of goo. After the residents of Eastbrook come face to face with the horror that has thrived for years quite literally under their noses, reactions range from casual ignorance to dangerously familiar hostility. What right does the government have, any way, to ensure that my kids aren’t devoured by a malevolent alien force? I didn’t catch sight of a “Make America Gory Again” hat, but perhaps Kahn spliced one in so quickly that it’ll take a few more viewings to catch.

Ick’s politics aren’t single-mindedly didactic, either, with Kahn leading several sacred cows to the killing floor over the course of the film. Grace’s boyfriend is a cheating jerk of the highest Stiffler-like order, but he’s also a stealthily faux “ally” to the under-represented and historically ostracized, weaponizing his so-called wokeness to his own prom-king advantage. It’s no accident, also, that Ick might be the first movie in history to let loose the words, “J.K. Rowling sucks” – no matter whether the movie believes that sentiment or not.

But Kahn’s real secret weapon is casting. Routh not only pulls off a note-perfect riff on the square-jawed heroism of Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell, but mines his own Hollywood trajectory – from Superman to, well, here – to inject Hank’s journey with deep reservoirs of regret. And there is no one other than Suvari – whose roles in American Pie and American Beauty represented an apotheosis of adolescent dream material – who can rightfully play the cheerleader who got away.

While Kahn’s film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, doesn’t yet have distribution – a crime worse than any perpetrated by the ick itself – I have a good feeling that it will find a home soon. It is a film that begs to be unleashed.