It’s 1995. You’re at the video store. You’ve already rented Arachnophobia, Ticks, and maybe even Skeeter. And there it is, buzzing around the new release section’s bottom shelf – Mosquito. Big eyes and an electric insect proboscis on the cover. The back of the box promises something from the producer of The Blob remake and They Live – plus creature work from a guy who worked on Batman Returns and Darkman.
You take it home. You made the right choice.
Mosquito is full of that clumsy confidence you get when genre fans pool what little resources they’ve got and put together something meant to shamelessly appeal to other genre fans. They substitute budget with enthusiasm, and that’s half the fun right there. And I always have time for these kinds of DIY labours.
The effects are all-in. Spaceships, miniatures, stock footage, stop motion, giant rubber bug puppets flailing on fishing wire… There’s not a lot of pretense or self-awareness here. Mosquito’s a loving pastiche that just wants to be the best damn silly monster bug movie it can be.
Without, you know, costing anything.
Like The Video Dead or There’s Nothing Out There, this was the perfect mid-stack rental for a Friday night bottom-shelf movie marathon with a few friends, a two-four of beer and nachos. I never saw it as a so-bad-its-good movie, it was fun because you can easily appreciate what they were trying to do – and they clearly wanted you to have as much fun watching it as they enjoyed making it.
Before the boutique bluray releases and the ironic appreciation, this buggy swatterfest delivered exactly the movie the hyperbolic VHS box blurb promised.
And even if you didn’t remember much about the movie over the years, you remembered the fun.
Well, I certainly do. -Pop