Gee, not bad for a second sequel. The budget for Mimic 3: Sentinel is kept to a minimum by restricting the film essentially to two sets, the bedroom of the Hitchock's Rear Window bubbleboy, & the street with building that he observes through his telescopic lens camera.
The street-set was built in Roumania & though not very elaborate, convincingly scruffed up & bad-neighborhood-looking. By imitating Rear Window the film actually begins with a sense of being a semi-serious thriller rather than a B-horror film, & a couple of small bits of what bubbleboy thinks he's seeing characters across the way doing, & what they're actually doing, is interesting on a subtler level than expected of cheap horror films.
But frankly the bubbleboy looking through his camera got very tedious -- scene after scene he is just looking through the camera, it's like watching the same scene over & over. It might've fascinated greatly if it had taken up the first fifteen minutes of the film only, but it just goes on & on, until the viewer is bored & thinking, "Christ's woody, just bring out the damned insects."
Great actors Amanda Plummer & Lance Henriksen are kind of wasted (so to speak). They have great death scenes, but given how long it took to reach the climactic scenes, they could've been used for character interaction to keep the first hour of the film from being so darned dull & overly focused on bubbleboy looking through his camera, interupted by the pretty young thing who plays his sister & who thinks it's a big giggle she saw a corpse in the sewer. They seem like a couple ten year olds.
When the people-impersonating giant cockroaches do finally appear near the climax, we see a whole lot of them, fifteen or twenty minutes of nonstop mayhem quite good gory fun. All plot elements are thrown out the door, there are no resolutions to what little character build-up there had been during the first hour, just a series of killings.
The human-like bugs are part CGI, & part costumes & puppets, all of it integrated nicely, it was fun to see so much of them fairly up-close. Their ginzu-knives attacks were more comical than scary, but there's a subdued campy aspect to the film & I think it was intentionally funny in a pokerfaced sort of way.
Characters aren't sympathetic so it doesn't matter who dies & who survives. For a film with such a slow build-up it was odd that ultimately characterization didn't matter. But it doesn't matter in most horror films, & judged on the strength of that long series of bug-sequences & mayhem, this one's very well done. Just don't think about the logic within each scene, there is none. Still, I rented it thinking "second sequels almost always suck," & it was a more serious cheapy than I'd expected.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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