Mimic (1997) BBC 1

Mimic (1997) is one of those late night movies you expect to be completely rubbish, but is pretty good. I didn’t know the director was Gullermo del Torro which perhaps explains it. The story, as such, is a quite simple, giant insects eat people. The way it is done, however, is ingenious. The insects in the darkness of dusk look human. There’s plenty of scope for jokes here by turning the transformation around. But it does work. One of the early scenes is of an autistic child mimicking their chirruping calls with a set of spoons placed back to back, playing spoony, is particular effective. He audibly narrates the type of shoes the first victim wears as the body is dragged down into a black space beneath a derelict building. The viewer hears the bump as the human body is forced through into a hole that the viewer had already seen it too small. This shows the force both of the mutated insects but also of the narrative. The hokum factor is kept to a minimal as the enlightened entomologist discovers a nest of these beasties underneath the New York underground. The beasties are smart, perhaps too smart, but they don’t have breasts. Mira Sorvino has, so there is only going to be one winner, and of course she’ll get her man and a surrogate child in a big explosion and Hollywood ending.