Get Bit by the “Cannibal Tick” Blu-ray! Now Available!
Jeb believes his late father’s purloined gold is stashed underground in his densely wooded backyard. What’ Jeb unearths is not gold, but barrels of chemicals Jeb believes to be just as valuable. What Jeb doesn’t know about the pinched drums is the ooze inside leaking from them turns the local tick population into diseased carriers, transmitting a sickness upon biting their hosts and transforming the hosts into ravaging flesh eaters that continue to spread the disease with one single bite. All hell quickly breaks loose amongst a sleepy backwoods around Big J’s outdoor food truck until a retired vampire hunter, Alec, turns his skillset onto the zombified undead when twin brother Roscoe becomes patient zero. Big J’s famous menu items pig dicks and beer won’t save the rustic hillbillies from a fast-spreading contagion but one kilt wearing son of a bitch aims to take on all of them with a help of local and his vampire slaying colleague.
If Lyme disease wasn’t already bad enough, chemically diseased ticks being the parasitic harbingers of the zombie apocalypse might just be the worst. Like a premise straight out of Valve Corp.’s Half-Life series, co-directors Ross Carlo and William Long’s low budget, running zombie-comedy film, “Cannibal Tick” will leave more than just a bull’s eye symptom in its bloody, outrageous wake. Mostly derivative from other running undead features, the 2020 feature length film is the debut and first collaboration efforts of the Eastern Ohio-Western Pennsylvania filmmaking duo with Long running solo in penning the screenplay of rednecks running rampantly through a serious case of tick-induced rabies. “Cannibal Tick” is a production of indie companies Poo House Productions located in Youngstown, Ohio and of William Long’s Dark Long Productions of Northern Cambria, Pennsylvania. William Long and Ross Carlo retain the producing credits as well as taking on principal characters as per standard in the microbudget, everybody-pitches-in productions.
In the spirit of low-budget creativity, Ross Carlo (“Rotten, Welcome to the Freak Show”) accepts his dual role fate playing twin Scottish brothers Roscoe and Alec. Carlo invests himself into the accent while getting physical when the ticking timebomb explodes and all zombie hell unfolds in the armpit of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania. His presenting of Alec and Rosco couldn’t be more different but still oddly the same as Alec’s has more of an interesting background as a retired vampire hunter visiting his brother, or rather just dozing off on Roscoe’s couch. Roscoe, on the other hand, is purely just a boondock alcoholic without much of anything else going on other than the next pint and a handful of used tissues from his personal pleasuring. William Long (“The Devil’s Wasteland”) also has a role in the film but just one as the gold feverish Jeb looking for his late pop’s buried treasure. Jeb’s quiet nature is not imposing and he’s terribly forgetful or just doesn’t listen to his wife but neither scenario is really relevant to the story, much like most of the carrier scenarios and backgrounds other than Alec’s vampire killing skills translating over to zombie dispatching. So many characters are quickly tossed into the mix of a 73-minute story that they’re unfortunately not well fleshed out nor provided enough substance to even instill an impression upon and what they reduce to is simply just fodder for the carnage for the sake of a high body count. John Catheline (“Deadly Numbers”) is and plays a forlorn former wrestler Curtis lost in beer and solitude for his prime fight days and has become a local mechanic, Maurandis Berger (“Chronicles of a Serial Killer”) and Sheneefah Johnson (“3 A.M”) are a black married couple who find themselves broken down in a white hick town, and Lena Devinney and the late Jimmy Barber Sr. (“Deadly Numbers”) are the couple who arrive at the wrong place, wrong time as they drive up to Big J’s for some pig dick and beer. The aforesaid descripts don’t go any further with no progressive dynamism that usually establishes either a love or hate development with audiences. “Cannibal Tick” also feeds upon Greg Bailey, Allison Devinney, Donnie Lawrence, Tene Gossard, RahZhee Emmaunel, Lisa Dapprich, Iesha Guzzo, Jana Ferris, and Michelle Dominique Buxton to be bigger in the slaughter and in the slaughtering.
“Cannibal Tick’s” concept is sound – a tick becomes affected by a barrel of leaking toxic chemicals that causes their bite to inject the zombie creating substance directly into the bloodstream. Yet, the problem is there is only one scene with a tick bite and the Rosco-Long production goes from interesting to run-of-the-mill zombie chaos with zero principal protagonist power. Another knock down is the substandard traits of an extreme indie production that relies heavily on the character captivation and special effects caliber to be successful in a demanding market driven by those factors. The former has been touched upon in great detail, but the special effects pull ahead as Michelle Dominique Buxton, who not only has a character role but is also the special effects makeup artist, is able to pull off a few interesting prosthetic monster looks as well as a decapitation death that in all honesty is really well done in framing and effect. While the solid zombie carnage infects survivors left and right with a ferocious appetite, the narrative then evolves with Jeb’s direct ooze contact, transforming him into some similar to a zombie king that sets up “Cannibal Tick” to a potential sequel in the future. However, that sequel hasn’t crawled its way to fruition just quite yet.
The blood thirsty arachnid with a zombifying bite buries itself onto a new Blu-ray release from SRS Cinema. The AVC encoded, mastered 720p resolution, 25 gigabyte BD-R with the purple underbelly. While typically unusual for a Blu-ray to be in standard definition, SRS Cinema’s certainly no stranger to their films being filmed in 720p, thus the format, but video, as well as audio, suffer quality buckling, especially when encoded onto a one-time writable disc that has its own technical limitations. “Cannibal Tick” sees quite a bit of those technical woes in its compression codec from banding, splotchy macroblocking, and loss of overall finer details. Many of the action scenes are done at night with little lighting and decoding struggles with delineation and details, especially when the use of commercial filming equipment was used. The film is at least presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The English audio isn’t written or displayed on back cover, but this does render through the receiver output as an uncompressed 2.0 mix that channels a dialogue and ambience stream through to another channel of a stock score. Obvious lack of refinement housed in a lower bitrate captures less isolation efforts on the dialogue, leaving disruption to run interference that spike and subdues pitches and tones, but the dialogue strength has solid recorded quality from a well-placed boom. Other than that, there’s not a good dynamic range other than zombie growl and gurgle to give “Cannibal Tick” a semblance of audio body. Special features include raw footage of behind-the-scenes of stunt sequences and makeup effects without narrative context, the original trailer, the official SRS trailer, and trailers of other SRS Cinema catalogued films. The standard Blu-ray contains original artwork of a large, translucent, yellow tick overtop a blood smeared, presumably, zombie woman that speaks greatly to and has intrigue appeal of an ultra-indie film. With a runtime of a little over an hour, marking at 73-minutes, SRS Cinema’s release comes region free.
Last Rites: Ultra low-budget, rough-and-ready, and imitative in a rustic sense, “Cannibal Tick” drains interest and captivation with the film’s throwaway moonshine characters caught and released in the throes of a backwoods zombie outbreak.
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