Review: "Mimic"

DEL TORO, Guillermo (Dir.), “Mimic”, Miramax Film Corporation, 1997.

In the time before “Crimson Peak” and “The Hobbit”, Guillermo del Toro did really interesting and visceral films, that scare the heck out of people for all the right reasons. As a director he’s capable of creating great menace and also great beauty. When he’s on form, it works a treat; when he’s not – well let’s not contemplate that. This movie is the quintessential del Toro film. It contains all of his obsessions and all of the tricks that he uses to make a statement. The only thing missing here is Ron Perlman.

To begin with, it’s about insects. Del Toro loves creepy-crawlies. When he did “Blade 2”, the vampires were less Bela Lugosi and more bug-like, making for a disturbing and – many would say – somewhat less than effective take on the old stand-by. My experience of that film was that most of the audience spent their time trying to get a better look at the vampires rather than flinching away from them behind their popcorn. It was probably not the right time or place for this variation on an old theme. “Cronos”, on the other hand, was a completely different matter: adding an insectoid variation to the vampire theme – in the shape of the clockwork scarab-thingy that infects its owners with the ‘vampire virus’ – was a stroke of genius and it worked a treat.

Del Toro likes the alien quality that insects bring to a story and it’s obvious that’s why he decided to dramatise this story by David A. Wolheim. The inability to empathise with a bug; the complete dissimilarity to human anatomy; the strange movements and odd noises: all these things are to del Toro what the xenomorph was to H.R Giger. The inability to communicate or relate to the insect makes it a perfect monster for this type of story. I wonder why – since he’s such a Mythos fan - he hasn’t thought about trying to do Basil Copper’s The Great White Space? Plenty of creepy bugs in that story...

Using a favourite motif, del Toro gives us the backstory to this tale in a series of flickering montages at the movie’s start. Through a selection of ‘found footage’ and still images, Manhattan Island, we learn, was afflicted by an insect-borne disease which affected children and which was named “Strickler’s Disease”. From the fleeting images with which we’re provided, it looks a lot like polio crossed with scarlet fever, or diphtheria – either way it’s nasty. By the time the opening credits are over, we’ve also learned that a cure was found by targeting the cockroach – the disease’s vector – and that Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) was the bug-loving geneticist who found the means to do this. Her answer was to hybridise a mantis-type insect called the “Judas Breed” which, insinuated into the cockroach population, not only killed it with its noxious secretions but would then render itself infertile after six months, thus eradicating the ‘roaches (along with the disease that they were carrying) and also the means of deployment. Very tidy; very neat.

However, F. Murray Abrahams – Susan Tyler’s academic mentor – is there to provide a timely warning. He might not be wearing a sandwich board declaring that “The End is Nigh!”, but he certainly has one tucked away at home, I’m sure. “Nature abhors a vacuum”, he metaphorically tells his former pupil; The Judas Breed worked as advertised in the laboratory, but then they let it out, and the world, he reminds her is a far bigger and less-controlled laboratory. Anyone who’s ever seen a “Jurassic Park” film knows what’s coming next!

Time moves forward. Three years on, Susan is now married to her CDC (Centre for Disease Control) contact from the crisis, Peter Mann (played by Jeremy Northam). They are trying to have children; however she (it’s implied) is unable to conceive (why this is automatically assumed, rather than anyone asking Peter to have his sperm count checked, is one reason this film bothers me). Then, on an otherwise uneventful day at the Natural History Museum, two kids show up with a big bug in a Corn Flakes box: hello, the Judas Breed, supposedly self-immolated by genetic trickery, has resurfaced and is, against all odds, breeding.

While all of this is going on, across town a cut-rate church mission in a condemned building, is having issues. Something comes up from under the streets into the basement and chases the reverend up to and off the roof. His body is rudely yanked into a drain by something very strong and silence descends upon the streets once more. There is a witness, however, to these events: an autistic boy named Chuy (pronounced “Chewy”) has watched everything without understanding its import. What he notices is the assailant’s “funny shoes”, fixated as he is on the objects of his single-parent father Manny’s (Giancarlo Giannini) occupation as a shoe-shiner. Next day, Peter and his sidekick Josh Brolin (imaginatively named “Josh” in this feature) are called to the church to check for viral outbreaks. They liberate the human population from the building and then sweep the locale for strangeness, which they find in the form of an enormous stalactite of faeces hanging from the roof in a back room. This is examined and found to contain a handful of buttons.

Things continue apace and the clues mount up from here on in. Mira Sorvino’s lab assistant discovers a bizarre crab-like corpse in a water treatment plant which turns out to be a larval form of the Judas Breed, complete with nascent lungs, absence of which is what keeps insects at a swattable size. The two kids who found the insect go into the subways to try and find an Öotheca, or egg case, with a promise of good money if they turn one up: they do, but neither of them gets to claim the reward as the Judas Breed don’t like their children being disturbed (they do like human children though, which they butcher and eat with happy abandon). This is probably why del Toro stands out from a bunch of other directors in this genre – other film-makers might have shied away from killing innocent children in this kind of movie but not Guillermo, and it makes the film much more powerful as a result.

Next thing we know, we’ve all joined up with a curmudgeonly transit cop named Leonard Norton (Charles S. Dutton) and we’ve headed down under the streets to find out What’s Going On. During the descent we discover that Chuy has been lured down here as well by “Mr. Funny Shoes” and that Manny, cutthroat razor and rosary in hand, has come down after him. Combining forces, we face the nightmare together. Although, it has to be said, things don’t look so bright because Peter – the same Peter who headed the scorched-earth take-down of the city’s cockroach population - asks Susan “what does this bug look like?” as they head out. Sorry? Maybe he missed the re-cap.

Deep in the subway, it might be expected that the story will run on well-travelled rails towards its conclusion, and, to be fair, that is pretty much the case. It’s the details though which make the difference.

Each of the players has something different to bring to the table: Susan Tyler knows bugs; Leonard knows the abandoned subway stations and how they work; Manny is the tool man, bringing the straight razor, the rosary and the Zippo lighter, all of which give our little party the equipment they need to execute their plans. The two CDC guys, on the other hand, contribute very little, although I’m sure the bugs found them very diverting. Peter is increasingly marginalised as the narrative continues: he is unnecessarily abrasive towards Leonard and constantly undermines Susan’s contributions. It’s as if the only role left that he thinks he can feasibly play is ‘leader’ and he has a hard time claiming and owning that position. There’s that old chestnut that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and no-one in this outfit seems to need Peter. Although his annoying spectacles do come in handy.

This is the element of the film that bugs me (see what I did there?). There is an assumption of male superiority all the way through this script. Peter claims Susan and provides a home for her, despite her ‘failure’ to provide offspring; she is constantly cosseted in the drama, being thrown into danger to be rescued, or prevented from engaging with the threat (despite being the best able to understand what’s going on). Finally, she gets saddled with an all-consuming protective ‘mothering instinct’ which sets her on a course to attack the Male - the insect nest’s only fertile male representative - in order to save Chuy. Meanwhile Peter gets to confront the myriad Females which populate the nest and wipe them out en masse in a Schwarzenegger-worthy fiery inferno. The patriarchal politics is more than somewhat heavy-handed, no matter how many legs you might have.

There are nice bait-and-switch moves in the unfolding of events. The Zippo doesn’t set off the explosion for example, and the straight razor never gets effectively used as a weapon. Del Toro sets them up as things to pin our hopes upon and then renders them ineffective, causing the characters (and us) to flail about wildly trying to find alternatives. It’s a nice, clever way to keep the viewers from getting complacent.

In the end, science and grim determination win the day. Our heroes get the child that they thought they’d never have and just enough loose material remains to set up the possibility of a sequel. In fact two sequels followed this, the first a splatterpunk gorefest that’s best avoided and the second a rather piss-poor re-make of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” wherein the serial killer across the way is actually a six-foot cockroach that’s eaten the neighbours. Neither are worth seeking out.

There is a final note I must make although perhaps del Toro would rather I didn’t. At the end of the film, Susan and Leonard are the only ones left in the abandoned subway car: Leonard is bleeding to death and Peter and Manny have left earlier to enact a plan which will get the subway car running once more, although - for various reasons - they’ve both been gone far too long. Susan decides to exit the safe zone and see what’s happening. They change the plan. Leonard says: “if the car starts,” (which means Manny and Peter have attained their separate goals) “I’ll meet you at the end of the platform” (to help her back into the train carriage). She nods and then opens the door. As she departs, we clearly hear her call out “Chuy?” into the darkness. Now, we the audience know that Manny has just found his lost child and is having a brisk and pointed talk with the Judas Breed about paternity issues, and Susan has been inside the train the whole time with no idea as to what’s been going on outside. How does she know that Chuy’s out there? Why does she call out his name? I blame an editorial slip myself but I can just imagine del Toro doing the face-palm thing at the premiere screening.

In the final analysis, this is a thoroughly gruesome and very entertaining (and scary!) horror film that ticks all my boxes. It’s way too preachy in places what with the lack of divine assistance being symbolised by crumbling Church institutions, ineffective priests, headless Jesus statues and Madonnas wrapped in plastic (another image that del Toro likes using, along with shoes) and with the paternalistic attitude of the male players a constant grinding of axes in the background. However it’s easy enough to skip over the worst of this. The jewels in the crown are the insects designed by Rob Bottin, and their ability to mimic their human prey: the way these creatures have been put together, you’ll be looking twice at any shadowy, coat-wearing stranger you encounter from now on!

Four ‘Horrors from me.