Mosquito

A group of people battle against giant mosquitos. The acting could have been much better. The special effects were superb. Sometimes I wondered how they got those giant mosquitos to look so real. This movie is like a mosquito version of Hitchcock's The Birds except the mosquitos fly in a smaller group.

What a tremendous achievement in American cinema! Did any of y'all know that you can hammer boards over windows without nails? Did you know that facial hair can disappear and reappear at random moments? Did you realize the safe haven that can be had in a bathtub? A perfect way to spend the day.

I consider myself fortunate to have caught "Mosquito" on a Sunday matinee. The opening scene depicts a huge mosquito smashing against a car windshield and the acting only gets worse from there. We get to see the "deputy" with a full beard in one scene lose the beard when the camera cuts back to him (stellar editing). We also get to see the main character who is the human incarnation of South Park's "Chef." My sides split when Gunnar Hansen (a.k.a. Letherface) picks up a chainsaw and says: "I haven't handled one of these things in 20 years....feels good." A commonly-used, extremely cheesy line is also: "..if I wasn't having such a bad day, I'd kill you." Anyway, go rent this, but you might have some trouble finding it (try a mom 'n pop video store).

I am torn on this movie but mostly leaning towards the side of loving it. The problem is the main reasons I love it are completely subjective, so I feel that I must still give an accurate technical rating of the movie.

I love this movie mainly because I remember seeing it many many times as a kid. In fact there was a time when my family and I would visit my grandma's house for a weekend at least once or twice a month and I would always sleep on the couch out in the main room, which meant I could watch tv until late. And for about a year, it seemed that every time we went, this movie was on cable as the late night movie, so I saw it probably about 15 times. I was young and so I wasn't really familiar with a lot of similar horror b films. At the time I remember thinking this was actually a serious scary film and not a campy b horror.

Years later now, I remembered the movie and wanted to see if I could find a copy of it. So I researched and got one and rewatched it. At first I thought this had to be a different film. The campiness of some of the park rangers reminded me of Wes Craven's "I Spit On Your Grave". But then quickly came in some of the really bad special effects and I knew this was the film I remembered.

So what does the film have going for it? Well it is definitely in the realm of those so bad its funny films. Although the movie does actually appear to attempt some humor which fails miserably. I think for me the best parts are the special effects, because they are so over the top and fake, yet also somewhat terrifying. I would say that all in all, the film feels like a homage to early zombie films both in its plot and special effects. Its definitely a film that anyone can sit down and enjoy for an evening if they just want something laugh at and be entertained by for an hour or two.

...it's just that Americans are so used to these cookie-cutter mainstream slasher, CGI-Alien invasion and "psychological" new horror movies. It's a movie about giant freakin' mosquitos, did you expect it to be a blockbuster hit? It's about a UFO that lands in a park in Colorado and the aliens get bit by some mosquitos in the forest. The alien blood makes them grow to the size of a small dog and they begin wreaking havoc on the park and it's workers. The only complaint and the movie's one HUGE weakness that makes it seem bad is the ACTING. Good god, i've never seen acting this bad, not even in the voices in a dubbed movie. It's like the actors are shooting for fun and they won't take their roles seriously. Once you watch it for about a half an hour, you'll get used to it though, and it even seems better after a while. The special effects, while they may not be Alien Resurrection-caliber, are still okay for the budget that the crew probably had. There's a lot of stop-motion photography with the flying mosquitos, but each one is hand-crafted and in my opinion, looks a whole hell of a lot better than this new CGI crap nowadays. One part was so over the top that I'm surprised nobody mentioned it. A giant mosquito impales Junior (redneck character) through the chest and begins sucking his blood. Junior's face begins to shrivel, snot starts to gush from his nostrils, then his eyes, twice as large as they were before the camera panned away and resembling softballs, pop out of their sockets a few inches, and then explode. What?!? Anyway, this was an extremely funny, ridiculously bad-acted, and blood-drenched sci-fi mutant bug epic. If you liked this, then I would recommend a few others that rivaled Mosquito in acting, special effects, and violence. These are Slugs, Ticks, and The Nest, being probably the nastiest and scariest killer bug flick I've ever seen.