The Modern Horror Movie As Junk Food: Part 10: Mimic

Let me make this perfectly clear. Guilmero Del Toro is without a doubt the richest voice to emerge in any medium in the genre of horror during the period of time that this book discusses.

His is a deep, richly creative voice that blends a knowledge of folklore that Neil Gaiman would find intimidating with a baroque visual style that is down right sensual, with a deep humanistic sensibility and a sheer love of story that is unmatched by his contemporaries. There are few artists whose work I respond to in the deep instinctual way that I respond to Del Toro’s.

And as luck would have it I am forced to write about the only one of his films that can be called mediocre.

Believe me folks I tried, but Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labrynith are all technically foreign productions and Blade 2 and his two Hellboy films are just too action oriented to qualify.  I’m stuck with the odd man out of Del Toro’s filmography.

Mimic was Del Toro’s attempt to adapt to the Hollywood system rather than the other way around. It is the only one of his films where he doesn’t have story credit and it shows. The plot of Mimic would not be out of place in any of the  50's Big Bug movies or Bert I. Gordon “Things are larger than they should be” master work (Making it along with Andaconda one of the last films to be old fashioned without being a throwback). One can easily imagine a paternal Hugh Marlowe in a white lab with a touch of gray in his hair coat mouthing most of the film’s dialogue (“My God They’re Getting BIGGER. If they should spread there’d be no stopping them!”) Watching Del Toro’s elegant style put in service of such a plot is frankly bizarre. Mimic becomes almost an exercise in cogitative dissonance.

Mimic’s confused tone starts from frame one, with a disturbing credit sequence that could be described as not unlike Se7en or a bit more to the point, “One of those late 90’s credit sequences that totally ripped off Se7en” which juxtaposes bugs with shots of dying children. I mean how else are you going to start a big bug movie amirite? It’s just the first of many examples of Del Toro treating the material with a solemnity that it all together doesn’t deserve. Instead of elevating the material he just gets dragged down along with it.

Now let me make myself clear, I’m not saying that Mimic is a bad movie because “it’s just a big bug movie.” Del Toro himself would never stoop to such condescension and I’m sure the man loves Big Bug Films. I’m sure Del Toro could make an amazing big bug movie. He’s currently hard at work on Pacific Rim which rumor has it is practically a Kaiju film. I’m saying that he wasn’t given enough room to bend the material to his skill set. He was, in short forced to make someone else’s big bug movie and the outcome was not ideal.

It turns out the children are victims of a plague that is being carried by New York’s many cockroaches. The CDC turns to entomologist Susan Tyler (played by Mira Sorvino) who genetically engineers a predator bug that takes care of the roach problem almost instantly until DUN DUH DAAAHHH!!!! SOMETHING GOES WRONG!!!! Despite the best efforts of F. Murray Abraham to add some gravitas to the joint (a note F. Murray Abraham is billed as making “a special guest appearance” a few years later he would get Thirteen Ghosts all to himself. Lucky Fellow) The film never gets remotely near surmounting the goofiness inherent in the premise.

Sorvino discovers that her bugs have survived when they have been engineered to die out. And wouldn’t you know it now they’ve grown to the size of eight feet tall and they’re snacking on the homeless, street kids, stray dogs and priests. Sorvino ventures into the deep abandoned Subways of New York to try to elimate the living plague of mutants she has created. Results are mixed.

As mentioned the odd thing about the film is that there is a fair amount of Del Toro in this thing. The old subway station where most of the film takes place is a great environment, baroque and haunted, a place of dilapidated grandeur that reflects Del Toro’s obsession with underground chambers and palaces. The film features one of his trademark courtly old world grandfathers (no gears though). The sight of the bugs in their first form (The film’s gimmick being that they have developed a kind of camouflage that allows them to pass as human at a quick glance) is undeniably creepy. A large shuffling mass with a face that is eerily just short of human. Indeed the bugs serve as a pretty good metaphor for the film as a whole. At first glance they are gothic at disturbing. But once they reveal themselves they end up just looking silly. Remember when I talked about how surprisingly well the 90’s CGI of The Frighteners has held up? Sadly that is not a statement I will be making about Mimic.

The problem is that such idiosyncrasies that are the source of such delight to Del Toro’s faithful are few and far between. For the most part Del Toro is stuck delivering what the studio wants. Mimic is the only one of Del Toro’s films that can be fairly called formulaic and Del Toro’s disdain for said formula is laughably apparent, and includes both A) The most laughably unconvincing flare up of maternal instinct I have ever seen in a film. Ellen Ripley Mina Sorvino is not and B) The male lead walking away from the most unsurivable explosion lived through that I have ever seen.  As a man who grew up on the films of the 80’s and 90’s I have seen more than my fair share of giant explosions that miraculously leave the heroes unscathed. But I have never, ever, seen one that was so sublimely unbelievable as the one that ends Mimic. It’s as though Del Toro received a studio note, threw it on the ground in disgust and then just decided to make it look as stupid as humanly possible. If this is the case I commend you sir.

This is not a case like The Frighteners where an artists voice stayed more or less intact in a hostile environment after a few concessions. This is a complete override of said voice. Del Toro seemed to realize as much and his next film was made A) 5 years later (one of the many depressingly long ellipses in Del Toro’s career) and B) Financed in Spain. By the time he returned to Hollywood it was on his own terms.

I don’t want to beat up  much more on Mimic. It’s the worst kind of film to write about a bad film by an artist you love. It’s only value being that it’s creation basically prevented any more Mimics in Del Toro’s career. The project left such a bad taste in his mouth that he willingly shut down his dream project At The Mountains Of Madness, and stepped off The Hobbit rather than compromise on either. Every preceding film from Del Toro has felt like a gift. If the price of that is one you wish you could return that’s more than fair.