Joseph Kahn’s Ick (2025) is a caffeinated, genre-scrambling splatter comedy that lives on needle drops and velocity. It is shameless about both, and that is part of the fun. Kahn edits like a music-video veteran, hurling you through an opening twenty-minute life-ruiner montage scored to mid-2000s emo and alt rock. “Swing, Swing” tees up the fall of golden-boy quarterback Hank Wallace, while tracks like “Teenage Dirtbag” slide in later as the movie keeps sprinting from bit to bit. The approach is knowingly exploitative of nostalgia and pop culture, yet the film is so nakedly in on its own joke that the excess becomes a feature rather than a bug.
The premise is gloriously dumb in the smartest way. The “Ick” is a parasitic, plant-like substance that has spread across the town of Eastbrook, creeping up homes and sidewalks until humans mostly learn to live with it. Hank, played with endearing non-confidence by Brandon Routh, never adjusted. In high school the Ick snapped his leg during a football game, his scholarship vanished, his girlfriend Staci left and married his classmate Ted Kim, his father died, and Hank parked his life in place as a high-school science teacher. Kahn races through all of this with precision timing, the rapid cuts and punch-line images selling a backstory that another filmmaker would treat as homework.
What keeps Ick from being only a collage of references is the sliver of sincerity running through Hank’s dynamic with Grace, one of his students and the daughter of Staci and Ted. Malina Weissman gives the movie a pulse whenever she is on screen, and the teased paternity thread lands as the most emotionally coherent thing here. Around them orbit Mena Suvari as Staci, Peter Wong as Ted, and Harrison Cone as Grace’s cocky boyfriend Dylan, each modulating to Kahn’s heightened tone without winking too hard.
The kills and creature business are knowingly goopy. The CG can look rubbery, but the cheapness suits the tongue-in-cheek mood, like a mash-up of The Walking Dead’s splatter with the cheeky geysers of Radio Silence’s Ready or Not. Kahn also gets consistent laughs from Eastbrook’s terminally online teens, who drop global socioeconomic talking points into every sentence with the zeal of kids who just discovered discourse. The joke would be insufferable if the delivery were not so sharp.
Not everything clicks. The mile-a-minute cutting sometimes turns a 93-minute movie into what feels like two hours, and the plot proudly makes little sense once you start tugging at threads. But the style is so confident that you ride the energy anyway. Routh’s hangdog presence is a clever anchor, Weissman lifts the center of gravity whenever the movie needs heart, and the soundtrack choices are weaponized with glee.
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Ick is a glossy, campy B-movie made with A-level command, the rare nostalgia-soaked horror comedy that understands timing as well as it understands vibes. It may be too hopped-up for some, yet it delivers enough invention and attitude to sit among 2025’s livelier genre offerings.
Score: 7/10
Ick (2025)
- Cast: Brandon Routh, Malina Weissman, Taia Sophia, Zeke Jones, Harrison Cone, Mena Suvari, Peter Wong
- Director: Joseph Kahn
- Genre: Horror, Science Fiction
- Runtime: 93 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: July 27, 2025
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