Oof, this one is bad. Directed by Joseph Kahn, who seems to only have gotten worse since directing the ridiculous Torque back in 2004*, Ick is a low budget horror comedy that plays with all the grace of a series of related TikTok shorts and seems scripted by ChatGPT. It wasn't, though; It took three people (Kahn, Dan Koontz and Samuel Laskey) to bungle this story up so badly.
The story concerns a sort of giant, underground slime mold creature which suddenly goes active and turns against the town it's infesting - both by possessing its inhabitants and by erupting from beneath with tendrils and blob-like extrusions. The influence from The Blob is clear, and the Ick acknowledges this by showing the 1988 version early on playing on a TV. First rule of bad, derivative moviemaking: Don't show the much better source you're ripping off, you'll remind people they'd be much better off rewatching that instead.
There's a plot, of sorts, in which a disgraced local quarterback (Brandon Routh) tries to fight the ick and reconnect with a girl (Malina Weissman) who might be his daughter. But the movie is so addle-brained, so fucking poorly put together, that nothing quite makes sense; This is a huge problem for a movie that spends too much of its time desperately trying to build up some emotional resonance.
I'm not kidding when I say it feels like watching TikTok. Every scene seems truncated, everything is world-shattering; There's no pacing, no tone. Same goes for the script, which is a morass of mediocre ideas and borrowed, basic beats. There are some bright bits here and there - a completely unnecessary, tacked-on love story between two outsiders gives Taia Sophia the movie's funniest line deliveries, and one possessed member of the Ick gives an interesting take on how the ick is pure chaos as a status quo, clumsily establishing parallels with whatever is going on in the US right now. Elsewhere, the film's would-be political parody is about as still-born as the film's drama or comedy - expect a lot of cheap shots at woke culture, right-wing conspiracy theorists, and people not letting a little apocalypse get in the way of their plans. Some setups and payoffs are sound, but they're statistically less than you'd expect given the amount of shit the movie throws against the wall to see what sticks... and the execution is so poor it doesn't matter anyways.
As for the acting... I like some of these people elsewhere. Can't hold anyone here responsible for following a script that has, to pull one of many examples, someone who's literally just been informed that both of her parents are dead squeal with delight when she sees that two of her friends are going out.
It's shit visually, too. Khan was an early adopter of the quantity over quality school of CGI, and that philosophy is very much still the case. The Ick is a cheap movie (the fact that it embraces its b-movieness is one of its few endearing qualities), and the meager budget is spread incredibly thin over a ton of FX shots. There's very little physicality to the various manifestations of the Ick, and too many of them look like a miniboss from a ten-year old Resident Evil game. There's also a CGI cat and CGI fire, and you can imagine how well that goes down.
The filmmaking at least displays some energy, but the poorly edited scenes (and the fact that the pacing is shot to hell) make it exhausting; Coming in at barely over 90 minutes, it feels twice as long, right down to one of the most insanely idiotic, unnecessary chain of false endings I've seen in a long time. Fuck this and the blob it rode in on.
*: In the interest of balance, I should say that his Detention was a whole lot better, even if I'm still not a fan.