Every once in a while, a film’s title perfectly sums up the viewing experience. Ick is one of those rare cases. It’s supposed to be a slick, cheeky sci-fi horror comedy about an alien plant parasite and a washed-up ex–high school star getting a second shot at heroism. Instead, it’s a 93-minute reminder that tone is hard, comedy is harder, and hanging an entire movie on Brandon Routh wearing a UV face mask is maybe not the slam dunk somebody thought it was.
Small Town, Big Slime, Zero Stakes
We’re in Eastbrook, one of those prefab American small towns that exist entirely to be destroyed by monsters and poor writing. The “Ick” is introduced as a plant-like parasite that’s been around for years, creeping across the country, and everyone’s just… cool with it. It broke Hank Wallace’s leg in high school, ended his football career, and then apparently became landscaping.
This is the first big problem: the movie’s central threat has allegedly been slowly consuming America, and everybody treats it like mildly invasive moss. No cults, no conspiracy nuts, no “Ick awareness” PSAs. Nothing. The scale is big in theory, but in practice it’s just another rubbery CGI blob that shows up when the plot remembers it exists.
If your apocalyptic parasite is less concerning than the average HOA email, something has gone very wrong.
Hank Wallace: From Friday Night Lights to Lifetime Original
Brandon Routh’s Hank is a classic American archetype: the ex–golden boy who never left town, now a sad science teacher. That should be fertile ground for character-driven comedy and pathos. Instead, Hank’s main traits are:
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Used to be good at football
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Now teaches science
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Has a UV therapy mask
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Makes increasingly bad choices involving a teenager’s DNA
The movie thinks it’s giving us a lovable loser with a heart of gold. What we actually get is a man in his thirties secretly swabbing his student’s saliva to do a secret paternity test, and somehow we’re supposed to find this quirky instead of deeply unsettling.
His big hero arc is mostly:
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Be ignored.
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Be right.
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Be less creepy by the end than he was at the beginning.
Low bar, cleared shakily.
Grace, Staci, and the Emotional Math Problem
The whole “Grace might be Hank’s daughter” subplot is clearly meant to give the gooey alien chaos a human heart. Instead, it gives it a weird, sour aftertaste. Hank discovers Grace might be his biological kid while buying a bar from Staci and her husband Ted, then decides to sneak a test using her student saliva sample like this is a perfectly normal thing for a teacher to do.
Grace finds the envelope and reacts with the only sane response: horror and anger. For one brief shining moment, the movie stumbles into actual emotional reality.
Then it shrugs, kills Staci in front of Hank via Ick-tentacle, slaughters half the prom, and fast-forwards to Grace deciding Hank is basically okay now. By the end she’s calling him a father figure and sending off the test herself, like the whole “you secretly collected my DNA without telling me” thing was just an awkward Thanksgiving story.
If you’re going to center the film around a parent–child dynamic, maybe don’t write the parent like a guy who listens to way too many true crime podcasts and takes notes.
The Ick: Discount Venom Meets Lawn Fungus
Creature features live or die on their monsters. Ick gives us… a blob. Sometimes it’s a creeping ground-cover. Sometimes it’s tentacles. Sometimes it turns people into walking infection puppets. And sometimes it’s just there to flip a car because the screenplay needed a beat.
We’re told it:
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Grows in the dark
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Goes into stasis under UV or sunlight
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Can infect an entire human body
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Can grow into a giant prom-eating kaiju thing
That sounds cool on paper. On screen, it mostly looks like the VFX team rendered three different ideas and nobody had time to pick one. There’s no personality, no defining rules beyond “hates light,” and no really memorable kill. It’s just generalized slime violence.
There’s one inspired visual idea: people completely overtaken by the Ick, bodies distorted and overgrown. But those moments are so fleeting and surrounded by prom gags and dad jokes that they never land as scary or funny. They’re just more content in a content soup.
Comedy, Allegedly
As a horror-comedy, Ick wants to juggle scares and laughs. What it actually does is drop both and then insist it meant to. The humor is mostly:
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“Adults are lame, teens are sarcastic”
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“Teachers are losers”
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“The military is useless” (groundbreaking stuff)
The house party invasion, the town hall scene, and the prom massacre all feel like they were written with the note “do a funny version of this,” but the punchlines rarely land. Jokes lean on easy targets—apathetic locals! Clueless authority figures!—without adding any clever spin or escalation.
By the time the military says, “We’re prioritizing the neighboring town, you guys just stay inside and hope,” it doesn’t feel like satire. It just feels like the script gave up on writing them beyond “generic plot device in fatigues.”
Prom Night, Again
Ah yes, high school prom, the eternal buffet table for horror tropes. We’ve got:
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The ignored warning
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The mean kids
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The underdog teacher
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The surprise attack
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The big creature reveal
We’ve seen Carrie do it iconically, The Faculty do it fun, and about 40 cheaper movies do it passably. Ick lands in that last bucket, right at the bottom. The prom attack is chaotic without being inventive. There’s no standout sequence, no brilliant visual gag, no emotionally devastating death—just kids running, getting slimed, and disappearing from the story.
Ted’s death—Staci’s husband, Grace’s legal dad—is treated like one more prom casualty. The guy’s been central to the love triangle/paternity mess, and then he’s just… eaten. No emotional follow-through, no real impact on Grace beyond “oh no.” It’s like the film is terrified of slowing down long enough to let anything matter.
Climbing the Tower to Nowhere
The climax has the survivors climbing a radio tower while the Ick devours everyone below, then freezing at sunrise. On a purely structural level, it sort of works: rising stakes, literal height, dawn as salvation. On an emotional level, it’s empty calories.
By this point:
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Half the characters are dead.
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The Ick is still just a blob.
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The paternity drama is unresolved but weird.
So we’re left with people we barely know clinging to metal while CG tendrils flail around. It’s less thrilling and more like watching someone else play a mid-budget video game cutscene.
The epilogue—UV lights around town, everyone adjusting to “life with Ick,” Grace accepting Hank, then the ominous DNA test result—wants to be clever. Instead, it feels like setup for a sequel nobody asked for, to a movie that already didn’t know what to do with the story it had.
Wasted Potential, Now in Neon Green
The really frustrating part is that there is a solid movie buried in here somewhere:
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A town that normalized a slow alien invasion.
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A former star forced to confront how he’s wasted his life.
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A kid realizing the adult trying to bond with her is both her dad and kind of a mess.
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A monster that thrives on apathy as much as darkness.
But Ick doesn’t commit to any of that. It skims, it quips, it gestures at heart and horror and then retreats into safe, familiar beats. The result is neither gross enough to be gnarly fun nor sharp enough to be meaningful.
In the end, the title does feel accurate—just not in the way they hoped. You walk out not thrilled or moved or even properly annoyed. You just kind of wrinkle your nose and go, “Yeah. That was… ick.”
