MIMIC (1997)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Genre: Horror/Survival
THE MOVIE
Horror movies are like icebergs of which we only normally see the tip. The rest of it is generally too unpleasant to show on screen. And I’m not talking about violence or gore, that’s evolved into its own genre: the sadistic torture porn movies that are so popular now. I’m talking about horror movies that identify people’s phobic pressure points and hammer away at them. Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly and Ridley Scott’s Alien both do this. Mimic is nowhere near as good as those movies but is stylish and effective and doesn’t pull any punches: kids and animals are fair game. In fact, the movie opens with a scene in a children’s hospital in which we see a very sick child struggling to stay alive. Although, children are commonly present in movies like this there is a convention that, although they maybe in dangerous situations, nothing is really going to happen to them. You knew Ripley was going to go back and rescue Newt and everything would be okay (well until David Fincher got a hold of them), you knew Timmy and Lex really weren’t going to get eaten by Velociraptors in that kitchen. In fact, there is a pair of kids in The Relic not unlike the bug collecting kids from Mimic but the only difference is that the filmmakers in The Relic chose an unrealistic but less disturbing fate for their two kids.
Of course, if you are scared of bugs then Mimic will probably freak you out. Myself, I grew up in apartments in Chicago, so I’ve had some run-ins with cockroaches. What the production design of Mimic does very well is capture the kinds of places where you are likely to run into bugs. Everything is dark and shadowy and wet and grimy. Urban decay is the overriding design theme. The movie even ventures into the legendary subterranean New York, where the subway tunnels meet once-elegant but long-abandoned train stations from the turn of the last century.
Mimic was one of the first English-language films from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who has given us such great genre movies as Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. Mimic fits well into his fascination with insects and monsters and underground places. The movie also as a subtle Latin American aesthetic to it in its Catholic imagery and especially in the way that the insects cowls close to form a face resembling Mexican folk art.
In the movie’s opening scenes, we learn that a deadly plague has swept New York’s children. The disease is carried by cockroaches who have survived all conventional attempts to eliminate them. An entomologist has genetically engineered a hybrid insect species to eliminate the cockroach infestation. The new species, the “Judas Breed” was engineered to be sterile and die out after a short period of time. We jump forward several years and there are several mysterious and violent murders happening in or near the entrances to the underground. We see fleeting glimpses of a tall figure that seems to be wearing a long cloak. Meanwhile, a couple of kids bring the entomologist a mysterious bug, resembling the Judas Breed insect but larger and more highly evolved. Several groups of characters go investigating the subway for various reasons and end up trapped and trying to escape the infested tunnels.
Mira Sorvino plays the entomologist. My first problem with this is that every time I see her I think of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion which makes me giggle. It doesn’t help that she’s about nine feet tall and has a weird tranny voice. On top of that, her character is written as a one of a long line of movie scientists who adhere to hare-brained theories with absolute certainty. In this case, she tells a bunch of people to smear insect guts all over themselves because “they’ll think you’re one of them!” That’s right up there with “Don’t move! It can’t see you if you don’t move!”
The monsters in Mimic are man-sized insects with the ability to rearrange their bodies into a vaguely human shape, thus they are the titular “mimics.” If you see them in silhouette or without your glasses on they look like people, otherwise, they don’t exactly pass. The whole mimic thing is really just a nice little visual subplot in this movie which is more concerned with big scary man eating bugs (the movie has about as much to do with mimics as Signs has to do with crop circles). The visual style serves to cover up a pretty typical monster movie plot that is fairly derivative of other movies such as Aliens. This was a troubled production and del Torro was fired and rehired by the producers over creative disagreements.
THE MONSTER/EFFECTS
Good effects all around. There is actually a surprising amount of practical effects, handled by the great Rob Bottin.
MONSTERS
Female drones and one big giant male “king bug.”
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
Widely available in a 1st generation DVD with few features.
As of this writing a nifty director's cut has been made available on Bluray with a digital copy. In truth, the Director's cut is not THAT different but it does restore some interesting subplots to the movie. If you were ever wondering what the deal was with the mysterious abandoned church where the Asian priest was killed near the beginning of the movie, a major scene is restored which shows the place to have been a front for a sweatshop. Also more prominent is the subplot involving Sorvino's character's attempt to become pregnant.
The set has some nice featurettes about the making of the movie. Refreshingly, del Torro speaks frankly and directly to the camera for an extended chat about the difficulties making the movie and his original vision for it. More generally he talks about the craft of filmmaking and horror filmmaking in particular, especially the studio pressures to reach the lowest common denominator. I was struck by something the director said, which was to the effect that some of his best movies are the ones he never got to make, referring to some of his famously unfulfilled projects like At The Mountain of Madness. He's currently working on Pacific Rim but has had a bad bit of luck over the last few years with projects falling through, starting with his involvement with The Hobbit.
The set has some of the usual stuff, such as a few deleted scenes and even a gag reel. They did a decent job cleaning up the picture but, it is a dark murky movie from 1997 so it's only going to look so good. It's actually pretty cheap at the moment and definitely worth picking up for fans of the movie or del Torro.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
None in particular.
SEQUELS
There have been two direct to DVD sequels, one crappy, one surprisingly good.
MINORITY REPORT
This is an ongoing feature in which we look at Race and Survival in monster movies.
The veridict:
It should be noted the director is not American but that doesn’t mean the genre trends don’t apply. That being said, he first dude to die is an Asian Catholic priest. Read whatever you want into that.
The wonderful Charles S. Dutton, an African American actor probably best known for the TV show “Rock” and his role in Alien 3 is one of a small group of survivors in the last act that consists of a black dude a Latino(?) dude and a white couple. The Latino dude gets it first. Then Dutton basically sacrifices himself so that the white people can get away (sort of like his death in Alien 3.) This is a movie stereotype I like to call the Sacrificial Negro. Ultimately the survivors are a white couple and an orphaned autistic Latino kid.
TRIVIA
The Assistant Director on this movie was none other than Robert Rodriguez.
TRAILER
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