When It's All There, Right In the Title...

Despite my Long Island heritage, the Amityville Horror franchise is a pretty large blind spot in my genre fandom, so when one of its many, many entries popped up on Shudder with one of the best/dumbest subtitles I've ever seen, how could I not give it a go?

IT'S ABOUT TIME!

Quick Plot: Architect Jake returns home after a business trip to New York--well, a little east of New York, that is--bringing with him an antique clock that he thinks his teenage kids will adore. 

Cause, you know, if there's one thing teenagers in any decade dig, it's antique clocks. 

Good girl Lisa and bad boy Rusty have been under the care of Andrea, Jake's all-too-generous ex-girlfriend who can't seem to shake her old relationship off.

They are not overly impressed by the clock. 

Jake, on the other hand, quickly falls under its spell (because obviously, it's evil). After being attacked by the usually friendly German Shepherd next door (in a delightfully The Beyond-like sequence), Jake is injured enough that poor saintly Andrea moves back in to help, just in time for her ex to begin displaying some werewolf-ish aggression.

Meanwhile, daughter Lisa's haunting takes on a different manifestation: horniness. 

Only Andrea and Rusty seem to be immune to the clock's possessing spirit, and both enlist the help of those closest to them to solve the mystery. For Andrea, that means her current squeeze, a pretentious psychiatrist just begging for a vicious death. For Rusty, it's his best friend: the eccentric old lady next door who always has a chess set ready for when he wants to cut class and...play chess with the eccentric old lady next door.

As Jake gets angrier and Lisa hornier, the clock's evil intensifies. 

It's pretty sweet.

Directed by Hellraiser 2 and Ticks' Tony Randel, Amitvyille 1992: It's About Time is exactly as much fun as its silly title implies. There are wacky, creative genre sequences laced with an odd sense of humor. A pre-Final Destination-ish drawn-out near death experience involving an ice cream truck, a mirror possession, toy train set seduction that turns into a body melt. It's a weird thing to enjoy, but you also kind of have to appreciate that it flirts with some sibling seduction, clearly an homage to The Amityville Horror II: Possession. 

I can't speak to how It's About Time measures up against the rest of the rarely universally loved Amityville series, but by golly, it sure is fun on its own. You might even say ...

High Points

The Sterling's house is so wonderfully late '80s awful that it genuinely makes the whole film pop

I do not have the ability to express how happy the film's final line made me, mostly because it's a feeling that might be bigger than anything else I've experienced in my entire 38 years of life

Low Points

As is true of many an early '90s horror film, there's a sort of lack of commitment to a full out spooky or comedic tone. While it works out when you watch it 30 years later, I do wonder what the real intention was meant to be

Lessons Learned

Unleashed architects are one of the more dangerous sorts to be haunted

Life is like a Skullcrusher song

Ice cream truck drivers can radio in emergencies

Rent/Bury/Buy

Sit yourself down and watch this weird little movie. I know what you like. 

And in case you forgot...

Tick Tick Boom

The tick, one of nature's tiniest terrors made all the more deadly for just how small and undetectable it usually is. Does it break the covenant of The Shortening to cover a movie about a little thing made bigger? Considering the ticks of Ticks are still hand-sized and more importantly, that I'm the one making the rules, I'll say no. 

Let's do this. 

Quick Plot: A youth wilderness trip run by two not overly social workers is heading to the woods. The group includes the anxious Tyler (a gloriously young and awkward Seth Green), prissy DeeDee (Monkees' spawn Ami Dolenz), her boyfriend Rome, the sort of mute Kelly, Melissa, the chaperone's daughter, not-at-all gangster Panic (Fresh Prince's Alfonso Ribeiro), and his vicious...border collie.

All are pretty miserable, some with fairly valid reasons (when the near-mute Kelly finally speaks, she explains, "After I was raped, I just had nothing to say." The subject is never brought up again).

Elsewhere in the woods, Clint Howard is adding some steroids to his marijuana crop, unaware that some of the runoff from his production is seriously mutating the local ticks. It doesn't take long for nature's vampires to make themselves known to our ragtag campers, who quickly end up trapped in a cabin with a violent pair of sheriff-murdering locals. 

Clocking in under 90 minutes, Ticks flies by pretty quickly once the titular arachnids launch their attack. Director Tony Randel (probably best known for Hellraiser II) gets his money's worth from Doug Beswick's super gooey practical effects, lingering on long shots of pulsating tick-popping body parts and dripping wounds. I'll never speak ill of a movie that incorporates MULTIPLE bear traps, particularly when an all-out Clint Howard is the one on the wrong end. 

Ticks had an extremely brief 1993 theatrical run, but is probably remembered mostly for its VHS placement on rental shelves. As a remnant of its era, it's a pretty darn good time, and probably holds some merit as the last arach-attack flick to not use CGI. 

It's hard not to have a good time with Ticks, even if it's ultimately a fairly empty, incredibly silly ride. 

High Points

For a cheap '90s creature feature that knows exactly what it is, Ticks actually takes the rare step in treating its first major death-of-a-teenager with the kind of weight it would actually carry in the real world of, you know, a group of randomly assembled teenagers were hunted by steroid-laced ticks and one of them died

Low Points

...at the same time, when you sit back and look at the death count of Ticks, tallying up three adult criminals and one black teenager feels a little disappointing in more ways than one

Lessons Learned

True parental love means dropping your kid off with complete strangers for a wilderness weekend and trusting them enough to not even bother meeting the people in charge

When in doubt, squish

Anxiety disorders will really flare up in stressful situations, especially when they involve man-eating ticks and psychos with shotguns

Rent/Bury/Buy

Ticks is streaming on Amazon Prime, and it's a pretty fun way to kill some time when you're looking for a good batch of bloody bug-filled gore. Tuck your pants into your socks and have at it.