TICKS (1993)

A group of twenty-year-old looking teenage city slickers go out to the woods with two social workers as part of a wilderness retreat. The group is your standard early 1990's horror movie teenager cliches: brooding dude, quiet girl, wannabe gangbanger and so on. Luckily for the viewer none of them are annoying and their banter is kinda funny. Like when the gangbanger keeps loudly lamenting that he should have brought his piece. At first, things go alright, but then our heroes find out that the patch of woods they're in is about to be taken over by very large ticks!  Nasty.

TICKS, or Infested as it was originally released, is an alright movie.  No real ups or downs, steady pace, okay special effects, tolerable acting, mild violence, zero nudity, zero tension.  Overall, it's an alright time-waster, but just too bland for it's own good.  There's never any shocking or stand out moments.  The movie just plugs along and then it's over.

Worth a nostalgic watch for fans of 90's horror, but others will probably be bored.

CANDY (1968)

Very hit-or-miss string of surreal vignettes about a sexy teenage girl who comes from space and ends up messing with a whole bunch of dudes. That might sound like the plot to a porno, but unfortunately CANDY is very tame.  There's not even any nudity!

A wiggly light comes down from outer space and lands in the desert. It takes the form of an attractive teenage girl. Then bam! She's in high school.  A great poet (Richard Burton) shows up and before long she's half naked on the pool table in her basement kissing Ringo Starr while Burton gets busy with a mannequin on the floor.  Suddenly Gomez Addams walks in! And that's just the first few minutes of the movie! It only gets weirder, much weirder, from there on. Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown in and somehow it actually works for the most part, especially the final few minutes which, I thought, were pretty awesome.

Some people might complain that it's bewilderingly incoherent mess and they would be 100% correct, but looking at it from a historical viewpoint, CANDY is a remarkable look into whatever kind of weird counter-cultural bullshit was going on back in 1968. If you are at all curious about the stranger, more psychedelic corners of 60's cinema then you should check it out.  Also, Richard Burton's crazy hair looks a lot like Bill Murray's crazy hair at the end of KINGPIN.