I have some vague recollections about 1997’s Mimic. I remember actress Mira Sorvino seemed to follow up her big Oscar win with it, an odd choice at the time if you consider most Oscar winners don’t immediately go to horror films. I think she said at the time her then-boyfriend Quentin Tarantino advised her to take the role based on the script. I had heard my parents, who rented movies for themselves on weekends and sent us off to bed for the ones that were deemed “too adult” and something like this qualifying as Dad had heard it was really good, and it did get a decent amount of praise coming as it did for an up-and-coming director.
Of course, today I know that up-and-coming director is Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, and I love that guy’s work. If nothing else, it will have a distinctive look.
Apparently, hundreds of young children are dying of a disease spread by cockroaches in New York City. Entomologist Dr. Susan Tyler (Sorvino) is called to see about doing something about it by CDC deputy director Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam). Susan’s solution is to crossbreed a new type of insect, a cross between a mantis and a termite, that will causes the roaches to die out and save a lot of kids. The plan works, and Susan and Peter get married afterwards.
Three years later there’s a new problem as what looks like a giant cockroach flies down and kills a priest before dragging the man down into the sewers. More witnesses come forward, prompting investigations by Susan, Peter, and a few others, and it looks like whatever the thing is, it is big, it is homicidal, and it is evolving into something more human in many ways. Whatever these things are, Susan knows they’ll need to wipe out the big bugs before they breed too much because, well, they could probably kill everyone in New York otherwise. That would be bad, and since these things look like roaches, they’re probably hard to kill.
Apparently, there’s a director’s cut of this movie floating around, and it looks like I saw the theatrical. I can understand a bit why del Toro’s original may have been cut up a bit. He was still something of a new director then, but what he did manage to keep in the movie does go a long way to making it more of a del Toro-style movie. For one thing, this one was not afraid to kill a pair of young boys. Granted, they were somewhat obnoxious, and a more sweet-tempered kid is a lot more lucky, but the point stands. Not every horror movie goes around killing kids when teenagers, many played by adults, and grown-ups are a lot more convenient. But this isn’t that sort of movie. There’s a scientific explanation for what the bugs are. I don’t know that I buy it–an insect’s exoskeleton is another thing that keeps them from getting too big, something the movie doesn’t really address–but it largely works, and should I really care?
But for all the movie has a lot of del Toro’s flair and his general distinctive aesthetic, it’s not a brilliant piece of cinema. Rather, it’s a fun popcorn flick, the sort of movie del Toro might have cut his teeth on but also something he seems to have moved away from in recent years. This is really a case of a rather standard creature feature with a cool look to it. Granted, this movie is also gross, but that fits since, you know, giant roaches. My grandmother, tough old lady that she was, would not have sat through something like since she was deathly afraid of roaches, so that fits, but this is a movie that is gooey, creepy, and dark. Basically, it’s a del Toro movie.
Grade: B-
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