Guilty Pleasures: Mosquito

I was trying to find something to post on the blog today, and for no reason whatsoever the movie "Mosquito" popped into my head. The film was released in 1995 and directed by Gary Jones, a journeyman writer/director/producer who has worked on everything from "Evil Dead II" to Bruce Campbell's "Man with the Screaming Brain".

It stars Gunnar Hansen (the original Leatherface) and a bunch of random B movie actors, and revolves around an alien spaceship which crashes in a swamp. The mosquitoes feed on the bodies of the dead aliens, and predictably, they mutate and grow to be enormous.

The special FX are fun, consisting mostly of stop motion animation and puppetry work. The film is almost entirely made up of practical FX in fact, with the glaring exception of the CGI spaceship in the beginning. Think of how bad direct to video CGI is nowadays, and now pretend you're in 1995... ya, it's that bad.

There are lots of deaths though, a few boobies, and a gaggle of lines delivered by Hansen with all the subtlety of a chainsaw to the brain. The funniest thing of all is that, with the right writer/director team and enough money, I could actually see this concept being scary. In the hands of B movie peeps though and a 200k budget, it turns into a fun hour and a half of cheese, which of course I'm not complaining about.

Most of all though, I just really enjoy the fact that it's shot on film. Too many low budget films these days are shot on video. And while I feel that it's an amazing outlet for indie filmmakers, I think that films like "Mosquito" show why it's important to shoot on film if you can. It lends a sense of professionalism and legitimacy to a film about giant mosquitoes, and that's no easy task.

So anyways, the film itself is terrible and probably not worth tracking down unless you find it in a bargain bin somewhere. I probably saw it on Joe Bob Brigg's "Monstervision" some night and that's why I have such an attachment to it, but the theme of the post is guilty pleasures so there you go.

Here are two trailers from the film. The first one contains really brief nudity and is apparently the original theatrical trailer. The second one must be a later one cut for the video release. Scroll below that for some other goodies from the film as well.