By David Dent
Director Bari Kang gives us an ‘infected’ movie that reaches back to the early work of George Romero in mood and setup.
Kang plays Jay, a distant dad who took to the bottle when his wife – and mother of their daughter Olivia – died of cancer. Jay is desperate to rejoin the world, helping out at the general store owned by his dad. But his own isolated state is matched by activities around his home city of New York; a virus is spreading around town causing its sufferers, infected and driven crazy by the need to itch, to fatally scratch themselves and attack others.
Jay’s own mother is just one victim of this; seeking to help dad he turns up at the store with Olivia at just the wrong moment. A hold up is taking place, one of the two robbers being an ex-employee with a score to settle, the other his pregnant niece. Shots are fired and innocent people get caught up in the violence, just as the local police lock down the whole City to contain the spread of the virus.
Kang’s resources for Itch! were clearly meagre; all the action is contained within the shuttered shop, with Jay becoming an unelected leader of a small group of frightened people trapped inside. Tensions understandably run high, even more so when it becomes apparent that one of their number is infected, the virus being pretty instantly transmittable.
It probably doesn’t pay to think too hard about the pathology of the virus; Kang is clearly less worried about the details than the human impact of the crisis and communicating a message that there’s good in pretty much everybody. But he’s also happy to wallow in the gore and injury detail. His message – that the virus spread is in some way symptomatic of the flawed world in which we live – makes the whole piece pretty bleak; only a slightly over emphatic and needlessly quirky score by Josh Roepe disrupts the mood from time to time.
Itch! screened as part of Grimmfest 2025.
Bloody Flicks 