A spacecraft from some unknown planet crashes into a swamp. Pretty soon the locals are having a major problem with mosquitos. A really major problem. These mosquitos are as big as a dog. There’s not much left of a person who has been bitten by one of these gargantuan insects.
Ray and Megan are young marrieds who encounter these bugs when Ray’s car splatters one. They hook up with an Air Force meteor chaser and they run into a nasty bank robber named Earl and his halfwit brother. They also hookup with a ranger from the State Park, the inept Hendricks. These six people will be all that stands between our planet and conquest by the giant killer mosquitos.
They are all pretty standard character types.
It turns out to be an epic battle for survival.
This movie doesn’t bother itself too much with complicated pseudoscientific explanations. The bugs are radioactive which doesn’t have any real significance but is presumably a nod to all those 1950s monster movies that used radiation as an explanation for everything.
This movie also doesn’t bother too much with the standard trope of the genius scientist who discovers the fatal weakness in the alien invaders. Our six heroes just rely on blasting the bugs with shotguns and hacking them with axes.
Earl also uses a chainsaw at one point which is a kind of in-joke - Gunnar Hansen who plays Earl is best known for playing Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
On the subject of casting, Hendricks is played by Ron Asheton, Yes, Ron Asheton the guitarist from legendary proto-punk band The Stooges.
Apart from the obvious influence of 1950s giant bug movies Mosquito also borrows ideas from a stack of well-known movies, from Aliens to Night of the Living Dead.
For my tastes Mosquito relies too much on crude humour, especially early on. It also relies too much on gore but in 1994 that was presumably a commercial necessity. I’m just not a fan of gore. But if you like gore and you like seeing giant insects getting splattered there’s plenty here you’ll enjoy.
There’s a certain amount of excitement and lots of mayhem.
The acting ranges from bad to very bad.
The most interesting thing about this movie is that it was made in 1994 so it was made almost entirely using practical effects, not CGI. The giant mosquitos are mechanical giant mosquitos suspended on wires. There is even stop-motion animation. Some of the effects work well, others not so well, but that’s largely a result of the very small budget rather than the limitations of practical effects.
This is a very bad movie. This is Z-grade schlock. Mostly I like Z-grade schlock but this is just not quite my kind of Z-grade schlock. How much you’ll enjoy this movie is a matter of taste. If you enjoy gore and crass humour more than I do then you’ll enjoy it more than I did. I’m hesitant to recommend it but I’m also hesitant about advising people not to see it.
The Blu-Ray from Synapse looks fairly OK. I suspect that this is a movie that never looked all that great. There’s an audio commentary featuring director Gary Jones and a couple of other members of the crew.
No comments:
Post a Comment