Gary Jones’ Mosquito comes from the right place: the heart. With a low budget and a lowbrow idea, it plays like a modern version of Bert I. Gordon’s big buggers of the atomic age, such as Beginning of the End and Earth vs. the Spider. The difference is that in his late ’50s heyday, Gordon never had the opportunity for a shot from the supine POV of a totally nubile, totally nude woman, looking from her ample chest to the creature poised at her feet, but its appendages reaching, er, higher up.
Thanks to a crashed meteor, the infected swamp at a national park causes its mosquito population to mutate to the size of a large dog. Said skeeters chase campers and drain them of blood through one nasty-looking proboscis. Often taking acting cues from cartoons, the terrorized human leads are cardboard and forgettable, save for the novelty of seeing The Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton as a dopey park ranger and Gunnar Hansen, Leatherface of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as a bank robber. Looking like a teddy bear in camo, Hansen is at his most Jerry Garcia-esque here.
Mosquito suffers greatly from second-halfitis. Jones (2000’s Spiders) throws so much at us in the establishing phases that he leaves nowhere else for him to go but back to the well. With each return trip, the pool of ideas is that much more depleted. To the movie’s credit, the in-camera effects of the mosquitos (and their prey) are inspired, no matter their placement across 92 minutes. (The occasional animated sequence, however, deserves a swat.)
Although Jones’ sense of humor remains intact throughout his debut film, Mosquito’s climactic confrontation is creatively bankrupt, what with the survivors boarding themselves inside a small house — and thus inside Night of the Living Dead — and, as an in-joke that’s not as clever as it thinks, Hansen wielding a chain saw as insect repellent of choice. Overall, the buzz is pleasantly mild. —Rod Lott