“SICK” is a slasher flick set at the time the pandemic was just starting in 2020. Its opening sequence shows a student, Tyler Murphy (Joel Courtney), while shopping in a supermarket. Someone keeps sending text messages on his cellphone to indicate he is being followed by a stalker.

He looks around but everyone around him is wearing a face mask so he couldn’t figure which one is texting him. When he gets home to his apartment, it turns out that the stalker has followed him and brutally stabs and kills him.

In the next scene, we meet Parker (Gideon Adion), a female student who drives with her friend, MIri (Beth Million), to their family’s remote house by the lake where they intend to quarantine themselves while the pandemic is going on.

They soon find out that the virus may not follow them in the lake house, but somebody else did. While there, Parker starts receiving bothersome text messages from an unknown sender.

DJ (Dylan Sprayberry), Parker’s suitor, later shows up in the house without any invitation and they are forced to entertain him. They eat, drink booze and smoke marijuana.

They all go to sleep in the upstairs bedrooms after drinking and smoking MJ. They wake up in the middle of the night when blaring music starts playing on the groundfloor.

Soon, a masked intruder starts terrorizing and chasing all of them and they have to run for dear life. They try their best to fight back and defend themselves but it turns out, there isn’t just one intruder but two more and things get really complicated for everyone concerned.

And this is as far as we will go as anything else will surely be a spoiler. Written by Kevin Williamson of “Scream” with Kately Crabb and directed by John Hyams, “Sick” is a low-budget horror gorefest but it works quite well as it exploits the paranoia and the fear fostered by the pandemic to clever effect.

We cannot reveal much about the plotting, but it could be the makers of this film is using the killer(s) as a metaphor for the covid virus who all just threatened our lives and, hopefully, we’re now free from its dangers.

It underlines the need for infected persons to keep to themselves and not spread the virus that could be a death sentence to those who’ll get the infection from them. Or else they would face any possible consequence of their negligence as what happened to the characters in this covid-themed slasher movie that turned out to be a dark revenge-driven story. The movie’s best scenes are when it’s showing action on screen, with it violent kills and a brutal killer. The camera movements follow the characters with an amazing fluidity with panning shots that makes the camera take a life of its own, creating a surreal to the horrors generated by the scene.

AUTHOR PROFILE

Mario Bautista