Honourable Mention: Cannibal Tick

This is a grade-z movie released in 2020 and directed by Ross Carlo and William Long and I’ll start with the title. They are not, obviously, cannibal ticks for, if they were, the ticks would be feeding on each other. Rather we have ticks whose bite can cause the victim to zombify. However, despite being natural blood suckers, it isn’t for the ticks themselves that this gets an honourable mention.

The film starts with a swing, a woman and her teddy bear and, whilst she does appear later, it is an arty opening that doesn’t really fit into the story. We then meet a variety of characters from country town USA. Jeb (William Long) is first. His wife makes breakfast but we get the feeling she is long suffering. He has been spending his days digging for quite some time, looking for his father’s treasure. Then we get a mechanic who was a wrestler and following this meet Rosco (Ross Carlo) who is woken by a knock on the door.

Ross Carlo as Alec

At the door is his (5-minutes) elder twin Alec (Ross Carlo), carrying a crossbow, and I wasn’t convinced by the accent used for the twins. Be that as it may, he has come to visit. Meanwhile, out where he’s digging, Jeb has found barrels full of green gunk (and this is the so-called treasure, later discovered to be the invention of his grandfather). Rosco stops by and they trade liquor, shoot some bottles with Rosco’s assault rifle and then Jeb spots a tick on Rosco’s neck and cuts it off. During this scene Rosco tells Jeb that Alec is a vampire hunter (first reason for the mention).

the new hunter

Rosco feels unwell and goes home to sleep but turns into a zombie. Meanwhile Jeb, who has been handling the gunk, turns into something zombie-like but sentient (and we discover later he can control the zombies). There is a zombie outbreak and most of the (mercifully short) film is various attacks and some fighting back. Alec rescues a woman, whilst killing his brother, who he decides would make a good vampire hunter and she agrees to join him. He suggests he will call Willow (Lisa Dapprich), a fellow vampire hunter.

Willow and the vampire

We get a legend that says “the following night” and then see Willow, with stake, hunting a vampire woman (who is protected by something with a melted looking face). We see the vampire beheaded and then she gets the call from Alec and is at the town in what appears to be record time. Their face off with the zombies is unseen – a black screen with some noise fx and, after a view of a wheelchair bound zombie trapped on a bus, we get a ‘to be continued’.

killing a zombie

So the mention comes due to the fact that two of the characters are vampire hunters and also that we get a fleeting visitation of a vampire. The film mostly is a zombie flick, it is low budget, the night lighting is not the best and the acting as you would expect for a film of its pedigree. The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK