June 15: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is bugs! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Tony Randel made Hellbound: Hellraiser II and I always hunted down his direct to video movies as a result. Like Amityville 1992: It’s About Time and Fist of the North Star. Ticks is another example, a movie with a cast packed with genre favorites — Seth Green, Clint Howard — and recognizable faces — Alfonso Ribeiro, Peter Scolari, Ami Dolenz — in a movie about exactly what you think it’s about. Ticks.

Jarvis Tanner (Howard) has been growing a super strain of marijuana that has mutated the local population of ticks, just in time for a camp for bad teens starts up, which includes Tyler Burns (Green), Darrel “Panic” Lumley (Ribeiro), Dee Dee Davenport (Dolenz), Rome Hernandez (Ray Oriel) and Kelly Mishimoto (Dina Dayrit) who are guided by Holly Lambert (Rosalind Allen) and Charles Danson (Scolari), who has brought along his daughter Melissa (Virginya Keehne).

If you’re an animal fan, well…perhaps this is not the movie for you, as a hamster and a dog get infected by the ticks and immediately die, which leads to Riberio getting a dramatic speech about just what his dog meant. The rest of the film has ticks burrow deep into human beings and cause no small level of calamity.

Personally, I hate ticks. Remember that lyme disease comes from them. Darryl Hall, of Hall and Oates, nearly died from the lyme disease he got from a tick that he claims came from a deer and as a result, he hates deer. Like, the dude violently hates deer.

This was written by Brent V. Friedman, who created the TV show Dark Skies and wrote Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal, Syngenor, American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, Pet Store and has worked on a few of the Halo and Call of Duty games. Speaking of video games, he also wrote Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

Also, this day is supposed to be about bugs and ticks are actually arachnids like spiders and scorpions. So I apologize that this is not truly a bug movie. I should have watched those ants brutalize Joan Collins.

You can watch this on Tubi.