18.
Mimic (Netflix Instant)
In many ways,
Mimic is a forgotten film. Its star, Mira Sorvino, seemed to have disappeared. Wondering "whatever happened to Mira Sorvino" led me to Google her, and of course the second auto-fill Google suggestion is "Mira Sorvino feet." Thanks, Internet. The last major movie that featured Mira Sorvino that I can remember was Antoine Fuqua's
The Replacement Killers, Chow Yun-Fat's first Hollywood film. Then, I wondered if Jenna Fischer managed to steal Mira Sorvino's face, body, soul, and career, which would explain Sorvino's disappearance from the limelight.
Mimic also seems like a forgotten film because it's the one filim directed by Guillermo del Toro that no one brings up even though it doesn't have the lowest rating on Rotten Tomatoes (
Mimic is at 61%, while
Blade II, which is more fondly remembered, is at 59%) or Metacritic (
Mimic is at 55, while
Blade II is at 52). Maybe no one brings it up because the released version wasn't del Toro's final cut, which had to wait until 2011. Maybe it's forgotten because it was followed by lackluster direct-to-video sequels. However, if that were the case,
Tremors and
Hellraiser (and, if I can be heretical, even
Night of the Living Dead, given what Romero turned out with
Diary of the Dead and
Survival of the Dead) would be forgotten too.
Mimic has the hallmarks of a del Toro film: he brought the fascination with bugs, the clockwork machine, and the old man and boy combination from
Cronos, the film he made before
Mimic; he has the creepy child that he would use in
The Devil's Backbone and
Pan's Labyrinth; he has the intricately designed labs from
Hellboy and
Pacific Rim. It has some of del Toro's trademark visual punch, but it feels scattershot, like del Toro was trying to mimic what Ridley Scott did in
Alien rather than making the film his own.
The film does pay off its tension contraptions very nicely. We see the film set up an autistic boy who can imitate the monster's distinctive footsteps with two spoons. We know it's only a matter of time until he's alone and attracts the monster's attention; either one of the adult protagonists will save him, or he'll be another casualty. And the film had already established that it wasn't squeamish about killing children by the time that the boy does get the monster's attention.
The scariest part of the film is actually the prologue, when Sorvino's character is led around a hospital filled with children who are suffering from "Strickler's Disease," which seems like polio that's spread by cockroaches. Roaches vastly outnumber humans in New York City, and del Toro plays with the idea that they're omnipresent disease vectors that disproportionately affect children, the most vulnerable members of the human colony, to set up the stakes. But it's the measure that the CDC takes that's frightening; even if we effectively eradicate cockroaches in New York City, how does that affect the city's ecosystem? Cockroaches feed on decaying organic matter, which frees up the nitrogen to return to the soil. Would anyone be so short-sighted or desperate enough to consider eliminating an essential part of the ecosystem to fight a disease? Who gets to make that choice?
The parts of the film that are meant to frighten are frankly to dark to effectively give the viewer a sense of the horror. It's one thing to obscure the horror and leave it to the viewer's imagination, but it's another to make the film so dark that your imagination has nothing to work with to start filling in the gaps so we can scare ourselves. There are a few jump scares, but if everything is dark, nothing is dark enough to scare. It's too uniformly dark, so it becomes dull instead.
People can be so cruel.
