Isn’t strange how Gary Jones little creature feature Mosquito is so forgotten? It’s filled with gore, tits, giant insects and Gunnar Hansen with a chainsaw! I guess some would call it a horror comedy, but I can’t agree. The comedy is more because it’s so broad with it comes to the gore and creatures, which are big, juicy and very colourful.It starts like all good movies should start, with an alien spaceship crashing in the swamps! A mosquito gets hungry and sucks from blood from one of the dead aliens inside and suddenly the mosquito’s is mutating to huge motherf**kers, ready to suck out all the blood in their victims bodies! A couple of bank robbers, park rangers, a tough meteorologist and other surviving humans sticks together, trying to defend themselves against the hordes of killer-insects!
The budget might be low, but it has an absurd amount of flair and energy! Here’s a monster movie that knows what to deliver, because there’s attack after attack, gore and slime, a lot of footage of big rubber-mosquito’s killing people, explosions, car-crashes and some very uneven acting. Gunnar Hansen plays a part that’s not a cameo for once – thanks for that – and get’s a chance to kill a lot of evil fuckers with his chainsaw!
I love movies that don’t care that the budget is low, they try to do the scenes anyway. Sure, some of the effect scenes are a bit hurried, and the acting is so-so, but at least Gary Jones shows us the goods, the fun and gore. The first part is like Friday the 13th but with mosquitos, and the last half is Night of the Living Dead but with… yes, you know what I mean. The tongue is firmly placed in the cheek without becoming pure silliness. It’s camp, but camp the right way – made serious and with very little nods to the audience.
Gary Jones continued to direct one of Nu Image’s best creature features, Spiders (which is a loving homage to older creature features, but with gore and destruction-mayhem, long before 2009’s excellent Infestation, directed by Kyle Rankin) and a couple of other lesser-known monster- and horror movies for SyFy and DTV. He obviously has a great love for old-time bug movies, and Mosquito is one of the funniest creature features to have been released in the nineties.
2 comments:
Completely agree. I love Mosquito and have enjoyed it many, many times.
The other earmark of the chip & dip flick is the microphone boom dipping into the top of the shot. They're running out of cash, the actor's got their lines right, so they use it. :)
The first feature film I remember seeing this was Walking Tall. The first one with Joe Don Baker. Seems like after that just about every B movie had a shot with the Boom bobbing down. It became a fad for awhile.
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