These actors thought the only bloodthirsty monsters working on this film were the lawyers!
Did you know there was a film out there about giant ticks attacking a group of teens at a cabin? If not, now you do. You’ll never believe what made those ticks so big and cranky!
Before Viewing
For this giant animal horror trailer, a number of teens or college students go to a rundown cabin in the woods. But instead of a bloodthirsty maniac hunting them, it’s a bunch of giant bloodthirsty ticks. A pulsating egg sack attaches to a girl’s back. The vet operates on a dog and finds something else. Gunfire, explosions, car crashes, and Clint Howard! This movie looks like it Ticks all the boxes.
Presented below is the trailer for the film.
Ticks title card.
After Viewing
Somewhere in the mountains outside Los Angeles, in an old wooden warehouse that is being used for growing pot, a strange mechanical contraption whirs to life, leaking a green goo through the floorboards over the egg sack of Dermacentor andersoni, the common wood tick. In the city, Mr. Burns (Timothy Landfield) drops his son Tyler (Seth Green) off near a bridge in a poor part of town “for his own good.” Tyler encounters Darrel (Alfonso Ribeiro) who goes by his street name Panic–because he doesn’t. A van for the Inner-City Wilderness Project pulls up to take the boys, and others into the mountains for a troubled youth retreat.
On the way to the cabin, the van gets a flat tire and makes a stop at a general store for supplies. Local weirdo Jerry (Michael Medeiros) creepily approaches Melissa (Virginya Keehne), but he is called out by Sir (Barry Lynch), another local. At the pot warehouse Jarvis (Clint Howard) is attacked by a large tick and gets stuck in a bear trap he was working with. The tick gets under his skin causing him to scream. At the cabin, Melissa and Tyler go for a walk when she gets an egg sack stuck to her back. They report the bug on her back to her father, Charles (Peter Scolari), and the other counselor, Holly (Rosalind Allen), but they believe she is overreacting.
Jerry and Sir show up at the cabin at breakfast time, warning them that there are certain undesirable pot farmers in the area and they should have caution. A giant tick attacks Panic’s dog which has convulsions and dies. Upset, Panic leaves the camp unannounced. The sheriff (Rance Howard) arrives to take a report on the dead dog. Charles takes Tyler to look for Panic and stop by the vet to ask about what killed the dog. Tyler explains to Charles that he gets panic attacks from having been lost in the woods as a young boy, but he’s trying to get better. The vet (Judy Jean Berns) looks at the dog, which is drained of blood, and pulls out a tick the size of a hand. It gets loose in the office but they manage to kill it.
The teens and their counselors grabs some breakfast before they start their day.
Melissa and Kelly (Dina Dayrit) go off to fish. They pull the sheriff’s dead body from the water and head back to tell Holly. Dee Dee (Ami Dolenz) and her boyfriend Rome (Ray Oriel) sneak off to make out and discover Jarvis’s pot warehouse. He startles Dee Dee inside, screaming that he’s infected, and then asks her to shoot him. A tick bites her on the neck. Wandering through the woods, Panic realizes he’s been bitten by a tick as well. He stumbles onto Sir and Jerry’s pot farm, where the two men shoot him, leaving him for dead–but also accidentally starts a forest fire.
On the way back from the vet Charles picks up Dee Dee and Rome. At the cabin, they plan to take everyone out of the woods but the fire is herding hundreds of giant ticks towards the cabin. Sir and Jerry arrive looking for help. Panic arrives and reveals that Sir shot him, just before the lad dies. Sir shoots Charles in the leg showing he means business and sends Jerry to get the van. Jerry, infected by a tick as well, begins to hallucinate and crashes the van into Sir and the cabin as the fire gets closer.
Panic’s body convulses and an even bigger mutated tick emerges, coming for the rest of the survivors. Heading upstairs, they barricade themselves into a room. Kelly reels a tire swing up to the window and Tyler swings down to the van bringing it by the window. Everyone gets out, except Rome who is attacked by the large tick. Tyler jumps on top of the van and using a torch, causes the tick to pop. Tyler drives everyone back out of the burning woods. Later, the van sits in a junkyard where a large egg sack falls to the ground and begins pulsating.
“My grandfather told me this. They’re too tough to squash.” – Tyler
Melissa comforts Tyler who often has panic attacks during stressful situations.
Ticks was a film I was looking forward to seeing and a perfect addition to a week-long look at giant animal horror. Unfortunately, it falls flat. As flat as a tick. Turns out the film was a direct-to-video release which is why it’s not as well known as some other films. On the surface, it looks like it might have a lot going for it. Tony Randel, the director, was responsible for Hellbound: Hellraiser II, a better-than-average sequel, but also Amityville: It’s About Time, the 6th in a nearly infinite list of films based on The Amityville Horror. It has a ton of familiar faces in the cast, mostly television stars. Rosalind Allen was a common guest player on TV shows through the 80s and 90s having stints on SeaQuest 2032 and Santa Barbara. Peter Scolari was best known for his roles in Bosom Buddies (with Tom Hanks) and Newhart. Seth Green had done a lot of bit work on shows, including starring in the TV miniseries Stephen’s King’s It, and would go on to play the werewolf, Oz, in many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Alphonso Ribeiro sandwiched this film between his successful stint on Silver Spoons and his standout role in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. There are even cameos (however brief) by veteran film stars Clint Howard and his father Rance.
The premise of the film, as outlined above, is relatively unique. There are a lot of movies about a lot of giant animals, but I’ve never seen any about giant ticks. Ticks are gross and dangerous as small insects, so a movie with super-sized ones should have ample opportunity for horror–and even some comedy. Doug Beswick, a special effects supervisor who worked on Aliens and The Terminator, was responsible for the creature effects in the film. These effects are quite impressive. Besides large, grapefruit-sized ticks that could be handled by the actors, they also created goo-filled egg sacks that show up all over the place and even ambulatory creatures. The tick that comes out of the dog runs around the floor and walls of the vet’s office is one example. It’s unclear if this was on a string, or perhaps contained some kind of motor that ran it across the floor. But whatever made it move, it was fast and creepy. There might have been some stop-motion elements of the creatures for a couple of shots as well. So with all these positives, what happened to the film?
Dee Dee discovers a wall full of giant tick eggs before being attacked by an infected Jarvis.
Ticks fails on a scripting level. There were many elements that seemed to go nowhere or appear incoherent. For example, the opening scene under the credits has the camera wandering around Jarvis’s lab. It’s difficult to tell what is being shown, and what importance it is. Some goop from something drips through something else onto a white egg sack–but if people don’t know what that is, does it make any sense? The teens are all assembled for a trip to the retreat by Holly–she says several times she’s gained their trust, but then who is Charles other than her boyfriend and Melissa’s dad? Holly says to him that she doesn’t “want them to feel like this trip is for your experiment instead of for their benefit.” What experiment? Nothing else is brought up about that. Everything else that happens is also extreme coincidence–more so than is standard for a horror film. Jerry and Sir are at the convenience store in town, and then show up at the camp to…warn them to be wary of marijuana growers? They are pot producers, so is this a veiled attempt to warn them off without really warning them off? The sheriff gets one scene before he’s found dead–but why? And half the kids really have no business, other than to be in danger. Tyler and Panic are the two leads, with Melissa having her fair share of scenes. Kelly gets two scenes–the fishing scene and an end scene where she gets a chance to use those fishing skills to hook the tire swing to help Tyler escape. Rome is there to be Dee Dee’s boyfriend, and Dee Dee is the hot chick who gets to scream. But why are this couple even at the retreat? They aren’t introverts, or people who have panic attacks, or troubled urban kids, or even the daughter who hates her dad’s new girlfriend. They are a rich girl and her ripped boyfriend. Yikes, so much of a mess.
The reason that is given in the film, or at least hypothesized by the vet, about why the tick is so large is due to it being saturated in an herbal steroid. Apparently, that is a real thing, but probably not used in the way that the film makes out. Jarvis was using these steroids to allegedly make his marijuana plants larger, but somehow the goo dripped out of his crazy Rube Goldberg apparatus (still no explanation as to what that was for), onto a tick egg–which made the resulting creatures thousands of times larger. I’m not certain why this seems so much more contrived than say toxic waste making large spiders in Eight Legged Freaks, or growing giant ants in Empire of the Ants. It’s probably that no research was done about anything in this film, and it all seems to come from someone’s imagination. Also a lack of consistency. The vet explains that a tick bite releases a numbing agent so that the person being bit never feels it. Cut to Panic screaming and grabbing his leg because of the sheer pain involved with a tick burrowing under his skin. It doesn’t lean into the absurdity of the situations the same way as Alligator or Lake Placid and takes itself a bit too seriously. Overall, this is a goofy popcorn flick that could be amusing with a bunch of friends over on a fall night. For extra added scares, everyone could sit outside in the grass to watch, while wondering what is crawling on their legs.
Jerry and Sir, two vagrant pot farmers, harass Darrel who is also infected by a tick.
Assorted Musings
- The film’s poster and VHS cover are marketed with actress Ami Dolenz who shows up in a minimal amount of screen time, advertising something that is not present in the final picture.
- Ami Dolenz and Seth Green acted together in the 80s comedy Can’t Buy Me Love six years before Ticks. Seth was Patrick Dempsey’s little brother, and Ami was a girl at the high school.
Having grown up on comics, television and film, “Jovial” Jay feels destined to host podcasts and write blogs related to the union of these nerdy pursuits. Among his other pursuits he administrates and edits stories at the two largest Star Wars fan sites on the ‘net (Rebelscum.com, TheForce.net), and co-hosts the Jedi Journals podcast over at the ForceCast network.