This appears to be an attempt to reckon with the lack of an agreed upon reality that the pandemic revealed in the United States through a horror comedy inspired by The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and probably other films I’m missing). But it’s an absolutely gigantic mess of a film. Only two things really redeemed it somewhat for me; a pretty astute revision of a disaster and horror movie cliché, and the fact that I laughed pretty hard 3 or 4 times.

So let’s start with the opening. This movie opens with the montage of our hero’s life. It is chaotic and full of rapid cutting with gags that are so quick it felt like nobody had time to react. (Also, they weren’t very good.) It felt like a textbook case on how not to speed through 20 years of a character’s life to start a film. That’s hard to do and I don’t think I’ve seen it done well that many times, but I have seen it done well and it’s not here. There’s way too much information, for one thing. The individual scenes are so short that I probably couldn’t have listed all of them immediately after watching the sequence. And the pacing felt completely off. Like a faster version of the rest of the film, I felt like I and the rest of the audience should be laughing but we weren’t. (Though I think I chuckled once.) If the entire rest of the film had unfolded as the opening did, I think we’d be talking about a 2/10 here.

Fortunately, things improve markedly in the present day, though there are still these cuts from characters to characters and scenes to scenes without any of the usual stuff you would expect to help the audience follow. Even once the movie has slowed down, the introduction to the rest of the cast – the high school students – feels too fast and surface deep.

And that’s because there is no character development in this movie outside of our hero’s. It basically doesn’t exist. That is one major reason why the movie doesn’t succeed. Everyone is an archetype. Even the daughter, the second largest speaking role, doesn’t really develop at all. This isn’t always a problem in a horror comedy, though, right? However, in this horror comedy, it is.

And that’s because of the movie’s fatal flaw, or at least the flaw that I think is the biggest problem for me: the Ick. The Ick is CGI most of the time, if not all of the time. And, as with so many CGI creatures, what it is, and more importantly how it is, is not limited by physics. And that causes a problem. Because even though the movie defines the ick as a very specific thing biologically – whether or not the technobabble is correct – the Ick’s behaviour is not constant throughout the film. It does things or doesn’t do things based on the exigencies of plot. So, sometimes it shreds people to bits and other times it possesses them. Sometimes it can literally pull someone through the ground and other times it can’t puncture a bed spread. Sometimes it seems to have killed people but we the audience aren’t actually sure if they are dead, even if we saw their bodies destroyed the night before. And because we don’t know how it kills people, or if it kills people, or what it can move through and what it can’t, there aren’t any stakes. We know pretty early on who is going to make it and everyone else we assume at some point will be destroyed somehow by the Ick. (Or maybe they won’t! Because sometimes they seem to fine when the sun is up.) The movie fails because of this. If the Ick made sense everything else I didn’t like about the movie would be way less of a problem.

But, since we’re talking about problems, another one is the satire. The satire is that most heavy-handed satire – conservatives ranting about the deep state and crisis actors and teens sounding woke. That’s mostly all it is; it’s not very funny, it’s extremely unsubtle and it gets tiresome really quickly. As Jenn noted, there’s an allegory here with the Ick that a better film would have leaned into, but that film would have had to have been subtle to work and this…this is not a subtle movie.

And another problem is the Springfield vs. Shelbyville/Pawnee vs. Eagleton thing. That could have worked if the film had chosen to lean into it but Oberlin is one of the many things that shatters the illusion that this is Anytown, USA in close competition with its rival. If that had been developed a little better, or a little less clunkily, maybe that would have helped with the unreality of everything else.

There is one part of the satire that does work and one parody scene that works. The flipping of the convention of a disaster movie where nobody cares about the problem instead of people literally rioting is great and I really wish the film around it had been better. And everyone laughed at the “local scientists helps the feds solve the problem” scene.

And I did laugh. Not as much as the rest of the audience. Only 3 or 4 times. But that is something for a movie that otherwise really got on my nerves. If I hadn’t laughed, I would be giving this a lower rating. There’s one scene where they actually set up a joke properly and it pays off really well – it involves the Mercedes – and all I could think about was “if only the rest of this movie was as good as this one scene, this would be a fun horror comedy.” But, alas, that one scene was far superior to the rest of the film.

4/10 feels charitable but I do feel like I have to acknowledge that there was an attempt here to make a unique film that deals with the social disruption of the pandemic in a distinct way that won’t be mistaken for any other movie. That has to count for something. And I did laugh a few times.