Review: Mosquito (1995)

Directed by: Gary Jones
Starring: Tim Lovelace, Rachel Loiselle, Gunnar Hansen
Written by: Tom Chaney, Steve Hodge, Gary Jones
Music by: Allen Lynch, Randy Lynch
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray/DVD (Synapse Films)
IMDb

Gary Jones, in his directorial debut, caught the bug (teehee) from 1993’s insectile terrors, Ticks and Skeeters, to make his own contribution to the canon of gargantuan bloodsucking parasite movies. In Mosquito, an alien aircraft of some sort crash-lands on earth and the blood of the occupant mutates a bunch of mosquitos into ape-sized critters with razor-sharp, fluorescent green proboscises (a word the screenwriters learned in pre-production and found ways to insert at every opportunity) that get to feeding on the local population of hillbillies and campers. It’s up to two park rangers (one of which is played by founding member of The Stooges, Ron Asheton), a boyfriend, a meteor chaser, and Gunnar Hansen’s buxom gray mullet and TCM homages to save us all.

Jones and his team of writers pay their dues to cheapy ‘90s horror tropes by ripping off Aliens while eschewing character development and suspense. The movie knows exactly what its audience wants: lots of dumbass characters getting stabbed in the eyes and tan-lined buttocks by bladed proboscises then sucked dry, arbitrary nudity, a little playful misogyny (“Only the females suck blood.” “That figures!” HOO-AH!), and little time wasted on cinematic flourishes like story. It’s very much goofball horror in that sometimes-special, often-obnoxious way only filmmakers working during the final decade of the 19th century could deliver. A band of survivors wander to and fro in a war of attrition, accompanied by a score performed by an orchestra of battery-operated toy monkeys, as the enlarged mosquitos collect their body juices.

But we are blessed with some incredibly fun special effects that include puppetry, stop-motion animation, and crude cel animation. They’re not always (ever?) remotely realistic, but holy hell are they a treat. It’s surprising they work so well, considering — according to IMDb trivia — the original effects dude went on smoke break one day and never returned to set. You also get to see some pale, hairy man-butt as a couple copulates in a tent amid a wreckage of paper plates, hot dogs, and chips, as well as a slow, clumsy big-boy slug fest between Hansen and Steve Dixon — and we’re all suckers for absurdly staged sex and fight scenes, are we not?

Everything’s pretty uniformly stupid here, with perpetual fountains of dialog ranging from inane to ludicrous, completely unnecessary “heroic” self-sacrifices, and screen time devoted to actors rasslin’ with rubber appendages (since these bugs prefer a lengthy tickle sesh with their victims before actually feeding). However, the movie does scratch a certain kind of itch, the kind of itch left by a motherfucking mosquito after it sinks its insect peewee into your exposed, summer-loving flesh for a sip of the red stuff.

Overall rating: 5 out of 10