Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

In 1997, Guillermo del Toro was not a rising legend in the movie business -- in fact, he was a relative newbie.

So obviously the sci-horror flick "Mimic" was an attempt to forge roads in the rough world of Hollywood. It's a flawed gem among horror movies -- it builds up a sense of slow, shadowy horror based on what could happen if humans play God, loaded with symbolism and eerie clicking noises. But it also has an insane climax, and Del Toro's direction often gets buried under the scares.

In the near future, children are ravaged by a cockroach-carried disease. Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) creates a solution -- a sterile mantis/termite crossbreed that will destroy the cockroaches, then die.

A few years later, Susan buys bugs from some street kids -- and finds a Judas larva among them (which promptly vanishes). Then the kids go missing... as do the subway dwellers. When an enormous dead insect is found washed into the water treatment plant, Susan knows for sure that the Judas bug has not only survived and reproduced -- but it's evolving at a ghastly rate.

Meanwhile, her hubby Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam), subway cop Leonard (Charles Dutton) and an immigrant (Giancarlo Giannini) looking for his autistic son all venture down into the deserted subways. But Susan has run afoul of the Judas insects -- and as all the humans huddle in an abandoned subway car, she finds that the insects have evolved even further than she thought.

The filming of "Mimic" was apparently a pretty bad one -- Bob Weinstein and Del Toro apparently argued a lot, and Del Toro later compared the final film to a pretty girl with her arms chopped off. Sadly, a lot of Del Toro's unique style was stripped from it, since the creep factor (an autistic boy wanders through a ruined chapel) and religious symbolism get smothered in lots of "boo!" bug scares.

But he does give "Mimic" a lot of atmosphere -- it's cloaked in a bleak, grimy, rainy atmosphere, full of decayed old subways and tangles of rusty pipes. While the science is sketchy at best, Del Toro manages to give the vaguely humanoid bugs a special quality of horror -- though the idea of insects mimicking a coated, hat-wearing man sounds silly, their crusty eyeless "faces" are pretty ghastly.

The first half of the movie is something of a bio-mystery, slowly building the suspense about where these bugs are, and how much they've evolved. Then the story explodes into a "Night of the Living Dead"-style horror flick, with the fearful humans trapped in a small space with bugs about to smash inside, and picking them off if they venture out.

The biggest problem? The ending. Both Susan and Peter face off against the bugs in a literally explosive finale -- the events of which stretch credibility until it snaps and zings you in the face. Really quite bad.

Sorvino and Northam are a bit stiff at first, but both blossom when one of the bugs carries her off into the tunnels -- after that their performances are full of barely-restrained hysteria. Charles S. Dutton is the scene-stealer here as a blues-singing, sharp-tongued cop who finds himself in over his head, and ends up being the most heroic of them all.

Buried under the surface of "Mimic" is a brilliant horror film, but the plot is dragged down by a hokey ending and mutilated direction. Maybe we'll get lucky and have a "director's cut."

It has some suspenseful moments. It's worth watching once. However, there are a lot of familiar scenes I've already seen in other movies. It's worth watching once.