The Ick is about to take over the Toronto International Film Festival. Tomorrow, the annual event celebrating the latest and most exciting new projects in cinema from around the world will kick off with David Gordon Green‘s Nutcrackers starring Ben Stiller. However, viewers looking for a sci-fi horror comedy treat will have to wait for Midnight Madness, where the festival’s wild side comes out with actioners, horror features, and generally some of the biggest crowd-pleasers. Director Joseph Kahn, whose 2017 flick Bodied scored the People’s Choice Award at the program that year, returns to the Royal Alexandra Theatre in 2024 with his latest, Ick, in hopes of repeating that success and offering laughs and scares in equal measure. Ahead of its world premiere on September 7, Collider is excited to share the spooky official poster from Creepy Duck Designs showing Brandon Routh and his students facing a terrifying infection.
Ick features the Superman Returns star as former high school football standout turned science teacher Hank Wallace, who’s caught in an apocalyptic scenario. Once in line for a career as a professional athlete, he winds up instructing disinterested kids about chemistry until the school itself is overtaken by the titular infectious substance. With the town having grown complacent about the dormant alien threat, everything is thrown into chaos when it begins to attack everyone around. It’s up to Hank and his students to put their differences aside to take on the menace, though the situation becomes more complicated as he also sorts out his complex feelings towards the daughter of his childhood sweetheart.
In addition to directing, Kahn also co-wrote the screenplay for the satire film with Dan Koontz and Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix writer Samuel Laskey. His ultimate goal was to create a humorous horror feature that could be enjoyed by the entire family, with a heavy emphasis on old-school practical effects to capture the same energy as classic creature features like Jurassic Park, Godzilla, and The Blob. The poster similarly seeks that tone as Routh leads his students against the low of the full moon while the titular Ick closes its fingers around them. Kahn described the movie in his director’s statement as a modernized twist on the monster genre that, at its heart, has family front of mind.
Ick is my dream of making an old-fashioned monster movie for a modern world. The keyword here is movie. Ick is an unapologetic creature feature. Instead of relying on gore and sex, we will thrill the audience with chases and escapes while a broken hero tries to mend family wounds. However, in our version, we are waiting on the DNA test to see if it’s actually a family (the world today is complex).
Like many great creature features before it, Ick also has something to say about society and, particularly, the tendency toward indifference. Though it can be taken as a metaphor for a whole host of issues about the environment, politics, and other forces around the world, Kahn says the goal is to satirize people’s willingness to ignore glaring problems despite obvious warning signs. All of it is then wrapped in an Amblin-tinted adventure with a strong cast, as the director said:
“Ick could be a metaphor for many things: viruses, terrorism, global warming, politicians. However, there is a difference between Ick and monsters of the past. Ick is there in plain sight. The generation today has lived through many real monsters. What we’ve learned is when the monster appears, people eventually… ignore it. Ick takes place in a world where the mind control of the monster and the apathy of the people become indistinguishable.”
Joining Routh on-screen is Malina Weissman as his maybe daughter Grace and Mena Suvari as his former sweetheart Staci, with Harrison Cone, Debra Wilson, Taia Sophia, Zeke Jones, and Jeff Fahey rounding out the bunch. This won’t be Routh and Suvari‘s only upcoming team-up, as they joined the cast of the starry romantic drama Fate with Cheech Marin back in May.
Ick premieres during TIFF‘s Midnight Madness at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on September 7 at 11:59 p.m. Further screenings for attendees will be held at Scotiabank 4 on September 8 at 9:30 p.m. and Scotiabank 7 on September 11 at 9:40 p.m. More information is available on the official website.
via Collider