Paul Sorvino's Daughter vs A Big Ass Bug!
The late 90's was full of movies with one word titles that was suppose to scare the crap out of us for example, "Species", "Relic", "Stigmata" and of course, "Bowfinger". And all of those movies with one word title stars a very hot woman who I wouldn't mind seen on the pages of "Playboy". (Hell, the chick from "Species" is naked for the first 45 minutes of the movie. WOO!) "Mimic" isn't any different from those movie. The very hot woman who I wouldn't mind seen in my own personal photo shoot is Mira Sorvino. Of course her dad could beat the crap out of me for saying such a thing. Unless my girlfriend beats him to it.
Mira stars at Susan Tyler and, at the beginning of the film, she is walking around a hospital full of sick and dying children, who have contracted Strickler's Disease. You get the disease from cockroaches and since the film takes place in New York City, there's really no way to escape it unless you got all 99 gazillion people out of the city and torched it. But of course that doesn't happen in the movie.
Instead Susan goes into a sewer where these roaches, called the Judas Breed because, I guess, they betrayed Jesus, live and without really showing us how, kills them all. A big news conference is held where her and her husband (lucky bastard) Dr. Peter Mann tell New Yorkians that it's ok to pet roaches now. Wait. If her name is Susan Tyler and her husband's name is Peter Mann...oh, she's one of those stuck up women who refuses to change her name when she got married. Gotcha.
Jump ahead to three years later and a priest named Harry Ping is running out of some homeless shelter he runs being chased by something that we can't see because the lighting wasn't very good. I guess we weren't suppose to see the thing. The thing, who is nicknamed Long John by the homeless people who live in the sewers and subways, manages to kill Ping and drags him to the sewer.
Watching all of this across the street is a "special" kid named Chuy who, by looking at a person's shoe, can tell the name, model, year, size, and, possibly, if you have athelte's foot. He calls Long John "Mr. Funny Shoes". I'm not sure why.
Susan is in her lab when two kids, one of them named Alex, the other one wasn't given a name but he had a major case of buck teeth, come to her selling her bugs because that's what she specializes in. The Buck Toothed Kid is holding a old Corn Flakes box and tells Susan something special is inside it and she gives the kids 10 bucks for it.
Wow. So, to make some extra money, I just get some bugs together, find a bug person, who are called itchysomething or another, and they'll give me money? WOW!! I bet people in Florida make a killing.
Anyway, Susan opens the box and finds a very large bug. She makes the mistake of touching it and it bites her. Pissed off, she nails the bastard to the table while she tries to figure out what it is.
Outside her lab, Long John is just looking up at the window as if he's Romeo waiting for Juliet to come out. I bet maybe Long John was reciting the "O Romeo, O Romeo where art thou Romeo!" line to himself.
Susan finds out the large bug attached to the table is: A-only a baby, and B-A Judas Breed but of a different sort then she's use to dealing with. As if she wasn't freaked out enough, Long John decides to pay Susan a visit by sneaking into the lab. It turns out Long John is a FUCKING HUGE ASS COCKROACH!!!! He frees the baby and disappears into the night, really freaking Susan out.
Meanwhile, Peter and his partner Josh, who work for some health thing named CDC (Whatever that stands for...maybe Cochroach Disease Control?) go to the church where the priest was murdered and all the homeless people got some disease, so the chuch is quarentined. Chuy watches all of this from his window.
The next day, Susan and Peter and Susan's friend/assistant Remy go with Alex and Buck Tooth Kid to where they found the large roach. They say they found it in this room that's now locked. Peter and Susan break in and look around when Peter drops his flashlight behind some lockers and tries to get it, realizing there's a hole behind the lockers. Right then, a subway cop interrupts them. The cop, named Leonard, tells them they can't go any further without a permit. So they have to file an application for the permit.
While that's going on, Susan talks with some bug teacher dude named Walter, played by F. Murray Abraham, who's most famous for being the guy who killed Mozart in "Amadus" about the Judas Breed. It turns out Susan created these things but they were only suppose to last a year, but, well, crap happens, I suppose. What I mean by that is, they don't say how exactly the thing lasted and lasted. They must not be using condoms.
Also, Alex and Buck Tooth Kid are searching for the eggs of the Judas, which in their minds if they find, they'll be tiny millionares. So they go rooting through the subway systems looking for the eggs. And wouldn't you know it, they do, and wouldn't you also know it, they get killed in the process.
Finally, the red tape is cleared and Peter gets the permit, but Susan gets a call from Remy. Remy tells Susan something odd is going on at a sewer treatment plant so they go check it out. Peter and Josh go to the subway to check out what's behind the locker.
The odd thing at the plant is a giant ass fetus that they flushed out of their system. Apparently human's aren't the only creatures to do such things. Susan sends Remy with it to Walter's room/class/lab/whatever to find out what it is exactly. That's about the last we see of them. This movie isn't big on character development, I'm noticing.
Chuy gets bored just looking out his window and decides to climb out of it and go into the church across the street. When his dad, Manny, a shoeshine guy at the subway (explains why the kid knows shoes), wakes up and finds him gone, he looks for him in said church.
Peter, Josh, and Leonard, the subway cop, go rooting through the subway and sewer systems looking for any more large ass roaches. They end up at an abandoned subway station that's like way the hell down past the one that is used presently and while standing on a rickity wooden thing, Peter and Leonard fall when the wooden thing breaks. Not finding a way back up, they send Josh to get help.
Susan finally arrives at the station and is immediately kidnapped by the fucking big ass roach Long John. He drops her off at a nest of sorts and when she wakes up, she decides to escape. She finds bodies around her which makes me wonder how smart these other people were if they just stayed there. She then realizes what she's up against when she meets another one face to face and stabs it with a pipe. She then takes off running and then she, what?!?! She's climbing DOWN!!! NO!! UP YOU IDIOT!!!!
Ok so she's an idiot. She's still hot.
Josh meets one of the bugs and gets his legs chewed off, so he doesn't make it. Just thought I'd update you about him.
Susan thinks all is hopeless when out of nowhere Manny appears. Then he does it again by appearing at the station Peter and Leonard is at. So apparently if they would've just tried to leave instead of waiting for that moron Josh they could've gotten out pretty easily. Manny leads them to Susan and they get her out when one of the bugs approaches. Leonard freaks out and starts shooting at it.
Since when did subway cops carry loaded guns?
They all hide into one of the subway cars that's in the old station and they manage to chop the bug in half while shutting the door on it. Susan studies it and realizes it's got lungs and other nifty things that humans have. Huh?
According to Susan, bugs often "mimic" their predators, and the example she uses has me curious. "A fly mimics a spider." How in the hell is that even possible? Don't flies have wings? Granted, I'm not a big bug guy but that really doesn't make any sense to me.
So in other words these things can look like humans and if they go the rate they are going they can look exactly like us, which means in the future we'll be getting it on with a giant bug. Waking up next to that transvestite doesn't seem so bad now, does it?
They all plan to get out of here when Leonard's cut leg, from the bug biting him earlier, attracts the other bugs and starts to attack the car. Susan rips out the dead bug's "scent gland" and smears it all over the car and everyone because if they smell themselves they'll stop attacking. And that works. Woo.
Leonard comes up with a plan to get the subway car to move but they need power, so Peter and Manny volunteer to go do so leaving Susan and Leonard in the car. Manny gets sidetracked when he spots Chuy and while trying to get him, a bug comes and eats him (Manny).
Realizing Manny is dead, Susan goes and saves Chuy. Peter gets the power going and spots a dumb waiter. Hey! The waiter can save them!! Oh, no wait, a dumb waiter is one of those little elevator thingy's. You know. Peter grabs Susan and Chuy and throws them in there while he comes up with a plan to stop all these bugs. What about Leonard?
Leonard becomes a goner when he recuts his leg open and the bugs come and eat him. Which teaches me to never become a subway cop. And I bet he wasn't even gonna get overtime either. Poor bastard.
Susan and Chuy work their way up to a working subway system when a bug comes after them. It turns out to be the male bug, and there is only one male bug so if you stop the male bug the female's will die out. Susan and the male bug confrot each other "Good, Bad, & The Ugly" style but instead of a gun, Susan uses a subway, which smacks into the bug. Imagine scraping that thing off the grill of the subway.
Peter stumbles upon the place where all the eggs are and finds a bunch of gas lines so he breaks them open and sets a spark so the whole things go BLEWY!!! But he doesn't think about the people above ground, when flames burst out of the sewers and possibly toilets. I hate to be the guy taking a crap at that moment.
Susan and Chuy make it ok, Susan thinks Peter is dead and Walter saying "Peter is probably dead" doesn't help any when Chuy spots Peter's shoes. Well, of course Peter is still attached to the shoes so he's ok, everybody's ok, and they all hug. The end.
The end?? Where's the trick ending? You know, where we think everything is ok but then we see the bad guy/thing is still alive. Every movie like this gave us a trick ending. "Godzilla", "Species", hell even "Wayne's World" had some trick ending's. But no, no trick ending. Least have the kid turn out to be a bug and start eating Peter then goes to make out with Susan, then we get to see her naked and...
Oh sorry. I'm back to reality now.
This movie was probably competing with another giant bug movie from the 90's, which was "Starship Troopers". At least I'm guessing. And this movie did hold my interest, made me wonder if there was in fact a trick ending and gave me even more reason to find bugs icky and creepy. When everyone wound up in the sewer, the movie really started to take shape.
I should point out the director and co-writer ws Guillermo Del Toro, who recently directed "Hellboy", so this Guillermo dude is just alright with me. Although he should've wrote some nude scenes for Mira...
Aw crap, now Paul Sorvino is gonna be after me.
3 stars.
Mimic on IMDb.com:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119675/